Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

Monday August 2nd, Ecclesiastes 1&2: 20 So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. 21 For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. 22 What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? 23 All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless. All too often, our view of life becomes too much like a clothes line, we start at one end and hang things on it until we get to the end, and hopefully, at the end God will reward us for all the things we hung on the line, all the things we have done. Instead, God calls us onto a path, one where we are surrounded by others and by the God who always comes down and walks with us. If all we do in life is for some selfish end goal, we above all creatures are to be pitied. In the end all we are left with is a big pile of stinking stuff that relatives and others fight over while we lie alone dying. If life is lived as part of the body of Christ, full of give and take, sharing with one another and seeing in every blade of grass and every child’s eye, the presence of God, seeing in everything we have a blessing with which we can bless others, then we are living the kingdom life right here and now. In that Kingdom life there life is filled with meaningfulness. The others who receive the blessing of our blessings do not automatically become gracious children of God, just as it most likely took us a while to figure that out in our lives, but it is not about their outcome, it is about ours. Our maturity depends upon our ability to give. Those who can freely give are rich, those who can’t freely give are poor, and it has nothing to do with wealth.