Stop and Enjoy the Ordinary
There is beauty and mystery buried in our ordinary everyday lives. It’s a mixture of the exciting and the mundane, the sweet and the sorrowful, all meant to lead us to glory and eternity. The key to joy in it all is humility before the God who governs it all.
God has carried us through another week of work, and we are greeted with a new weekend. For many of us these next two days are free from work duties. It’s an opportunity for rest and leisure, and for taking time to think about our lives in the sovereign God’s story.
And thankfully we are not left to our own speculation. God wrote a book, and within that book is another book, the book of Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes is realistic. It teaches us that life under the sun is often empty, futile, and absurd, and yet it does not run us into the rocks of despair either. The conclusion of the book functions as the lens, the perspective, by which the whole of the book should be read. “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:13–14). When we understand that this world isn’t paradise on earth, we are reminded that nothing is more important than a right relationship with God.
Ecclesiastes reminds us of our limitations and finiteness. We read in Ecclesiastes 3:11, God “has made everything beautiful in its time.” Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
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