Beyond Imagination

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. -- Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV

I'll be honest, I can't wrap my brain around God. I know God exists...I've seen too much evidence of Him. Whenever I hear a scientist offer up some new evidence about the way the universe works, it serves to strengthen my belief that a random set of occurrences is simply not how all of this came to be. I feel God's presence with me more now than at any time in my life. I can see the beauty even in people or things most of the world would not consider beautiful. Still, my feeble mind has a hard time comprehending eternity.

Things have a beginning. Things have a middle. Things have an end. It is the nature of things to start somewhere and end somewhere....books, a glass of water, seasons, relationships...all finite in nature. Wouldn't the being we call God have to have had a beginning as well? The Bible tells us that in the beginning there was the Word, that the Word was with God, and that the Word was God. In a finite existence such as ours how can we possibly comprehend there being absolutely nothing without God? And yet, reading a little further in Ecclesiastes offers the following in verse 15:

Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account.

You've never read a book that ended in such a way that there is absolutely no more to the story, another glass of water is a quick trip to the sink away, the seasons change but in another year you will experience it again, and our relationships will come to an end, if not by our own doing then be death. The promise of God through Jesus is that even death cannot stop our true being...our souls.

We see that things are finite, but we don't always understand that they are also cyclical. God's creation, though, is eternal in nature and perfect in it's design. I still don't know how to wrap my mind around God, but I can get behind His promise of eternity by understanding that what seems to us like the end of a thing is really only the new beginning of another.