“Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Ecclesiastes 1:2

 Just recently I was deep cleaning the book shelves and filing cabinets in my office. It was therapeutic and affecting. Throwing away years of life work does something in you.  Each folder represented stress and success and urgency and accomplishment. Six months of work--gone with the flick of a wrist. Eight years of labor accumulated at the bottom of a trash can. It’s a clarifying moment. Some people have watched their house burn to the ground and experienced the same emotions compounded. Others have survived a life-threatening illness or accident. These events have a way of zooming the camera lens out and looking at life from an entirely different perspective.  

 Solomon is doing the same in Ecclesiastes. “Meaningless! Meaningless!” Or in our language--pointless, pointless; what’s the point? Life is full of empty boasts and useless energy. This is a message our culture needs to hear. We’re constantly milking the cow for something to sooth our hunger pain. Pleasure. Achievement. Notoriety. Each is a blessing when lived in God and completely empty without him. Perhaps you’ve recognized the same empty ache. It’s like a hunger pain, only deeper in the soul--a soul craving for depth or meaning; an itch that you can’t scratch without God. Those who try, the Buddhist monks call the hungry ghost. 

Solomon takes us to the graveyard and makes us stare at our final destination. He let’s the certainty of death sheer off the pretense and tinsel of life. When we see our smallness and vanity, when we see the emptiness of our boasts and our cravings--the one hour of basking in the sunlight--perhaps we will more deeply appreciate the Giver who is above it all. He asks that we surrender it all to him, because without him they are pointless. But once we have returned the blessings to the Blesser he gives them back in their appropriate measure, this time as a blessing and not an empty sweat-tooth. We want to hoard them. He wants us to hoard him. 

What are you hoarding in life: knowledge, privilege, friendships, control, cultural refinement, a personal identity. I can promise you, whatever it is, it grows emptier by the decade. In contrast, the Blesser becomes more satisfying by the decade. He becomes the treasure without measure; the compounded interest. Hoard him, he is the ingredient that gives everything it’s savory flavor. 

Tags: gifts, vanity, meaning, blessing, hungry, pleasure, empty, meaningless, achievement, blesser, soul hunger