God-given tension
I’m writing over at Truly Co. Magazine this week! Here’s a preview of the article …
It’s a little unnerving when a book of the Bible gets all up in our business. Reading through Solomon’s realizations in the book of Ecclesiastes is like having someone put words to deeply felt truths and insecurities. It’s at once an uncomfortable exposure and consoling company. The author sums up a universal tension: how the temporal nature of this world chafes (see Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:11,17, 26; 4:7) with our desire to put a permanent significance to our earthly work (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Like perpetual mismatched socks, on the left we wear the eternal, and on the right we put on the temporal, and every day we are reminded of it.
The tension is highlighted when the hard work we’ve done to establish our name is overlooked by a supervisor. We sense the contradiction when we save money only to have it lost in an economic downturn. While we sit and fold a shirt, just to wash and fold it again the next week, we nod in agreement with the author of Ecclesiastes. There is no amount of hard work, smart planning, or bootstrap effort that will create a permanence of our earthly work. We grimace when we read that, but maybe we need to read it again. And this time let’s not let it fall on us as judgment, but as a release.
