Written on the Heart

In 2019, a grandmother in Louisville, Kentucky named Dorothy Carter sat at her kitchen table teaching her six-year-old grandson, Marcus, to read. Every afternoon, she traced letters on flashcards while he squirmed and fidgeted. He could recite the rules — "i before e," sound it out — but reading felt like a chore imposed from outside.

Then one Saturday, Dorothy found Marcus curled up on the couch, sounding out words in a comic book all by himself. He wasn't following rules anymore. Something had shifted. The knowledge had moved from the flashcard to somewhere deep inside him. He wasn't obeying instructions about reading — he was a reader.

This is the revolution God announces through Jeremiah. For generations, Israel related to the Torah as something external — carved on stone, read from scrolls, enforced by priests. The people could recite the commands but kept wandering away from them. So the Almighty declared something breathtaking: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts."

God wasn't offering a new set of rules. He was promising a new kind of knowing — intimate, internal, as natural as breathing. No longer would people need someone else to say, "Know the Lord," because from the least to the greatest, they would already know Him. The law would stop being homework and start being heartbeat.

Dorothy's flashcards did their work. But the real miracle was the morning Marcus no longer needed them.