Just some early morning thoughts from me to you…
“These are the words of the Teacher, King David’s son, who ruled in Jerusalem. ‘Everything is meaningless,’ says the Teacher, ‘completely meaningless! What do people get for all their hard work under the sun?… I observed everything going on under the sun, and really, it is all meaningless—like chasing the wind…’”
Ecclesiastes 1: 1-3, 14 (NLT)
Meaningless.
Looking back we could have written that ourselves about the stuff we went through. Certainly we have felt that way too many times in the day-to-day journey of our lives.
It all seems meaningless. Things don’t make sense.
Solomon didn’t have to tell us. We know. We’ve felt it.
That’s how Solomon felt at the end of his days.
The man whom we have held up at times as the wisest of the wise and the wealthiest who ever lived, says—“…everything going on under the sun…is all meaningless—like chasing the wind.”
He had everything the world held out as important—but realized at the end of his life, that it wasn’t important and really amounted to nothing at all.
A wasted life?
Maybe a life lived at less than it could have been.
A life built on the strength of paper mache. On an unsettled, unreliable foundation of the shifting sands of the world’s values and expectations.
Meaningless—a life following the world’s price tags.
And as Solomon did, we too wrestle through it all to find what really is important.
To figure out what to do, and where to turn, when the storms of life hit us full in the face. When the losses begin to outnumber the wins. When we stand at a fork in the road and can’t decide which way to go.
When heartache hits—and all we feel through the numbness is the growing weight of the unfairness of it all. When we can’t make sense of what and why, and hope begins to fade as we look and reach for a way.
So where do we turn for help?
What does the world have to offer to help us deal with it all?
Solomon finally realized near the end of his life, that the answer to that question was this—Nothing.
The world’s answers and what the world holds up as important—“…is all meaningless—like chasing the wind.”
And then near the end of his life, Solomon learns and points us to help, to hope, and to what is important.
He offers an eternal truth to embrace and internalize in our lives, no matter what we face, when he shares—
“…Here now is my final conclusion: Fear God and obey his commands, for this is everyone’s duty.” (Ecclesiastes 12: 13).
The eternal hope of God.
No matter what we face, no matter what happens, notwithstanding what the world suggests and expects—Solomon realized at the end of his life that God was always the right way, and the only truth for his life which would point him to the important.
The only place to turn.
For you and me, too.
In His Name–Scott
