Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3:11

Is that all there is?  That’s what a little 9-year-old girl asked herself.

When Julie was five, her mom gave her first “perm” to make her hair look like something that it wasn’t.  It was important, her little mind took in, to be pretty, and she concluded that she was a disappointment. Other traumatic life events followed.  By age 10, life already wasn’t what Julie wanted or hoped it would be. She remembers hearing a song that captured what she felt inside but couldn’t have put into words.

Peggy Lee’s haunting hit song, Is That All There Is? tells of bitter disappointment in the things we think will give meaning: possessions, entertainment, love.  Lee wearily sang, “When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath, I’ll be saying to myself, ‘Is that all there is?'”

But Julie came to know the answer to that question, and she says, “Apart from relationship with God, yes, that’s all there is.  But with Him, there is more.  So much more.”

The Bible says that God has planted eternity in the hearts of man (Ecclesiastes 3:11) and so we yearn, unconsciously, for the lives we were meant to live.  Jesus said, “I came so that they would have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10 NASB).

In right relationship with God, death is a beginning to an eternity the way things were supposed to be, and without end. “For this is how God loved the world,” the Bible book of John says, “He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

That eternal life can start for you today.