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Flopping Down on the Treadmills of Life

Summertime is here.  It’s the time of year for shorts and flip-flops.  But some people never stopped wearing shorts and flip-flops.  For them, shorts and flip-flops are year round attire. You can see some of these people out walking in a snowstorm wearing shorts and no jacket.  It’s as though they don’t know that summer is a different season than winter.

In life, it is important to know what season you are in and act accordingly. If not, you could be working against the God ordained rhythms in your life.  It's foolish to plant corn in January. It's foolish to transplant shrubs in July. Each season has its suitable tasks, its required duties, its necessary constraints. What is true seasonally is also true spiritually, which is the theme of Ecclesiastes 3 stating, “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.”

If that phrase sounds familiar, there might be a good reason. If you are enjoy with music trivia, perhaps you can answer this question: Which U.S. hit song has the honor of having the oldest lyrics? The answer is the song, “To Everything There Is a Season” by the band The Byrds in 1965. Curiously, the lyrics are taken word for word from chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes.

That song calls attention the fact that there are different times for different experiences in our lives. Often what is so difficult about life is we don’t know which times are which.   And this applies to all of us; not just some guys who wear shorts and flip-flops in the winter.  Say you have a relative who doesn’t know Jesus.  How do you know whether it is it the time to speak or the time to be silent? Or suppose a friend has betrayed you.  Is it time to uproot the friendship or the time to heal it?

 

The author of Ecclesiastes sets out to understand life. So he explores every pleasure, every bit of wealth and power, work and social service, even a basic kind of religion. Everything people say makes life meaningful.  Several years ago, the actor Jim Carrey said this in an interview: I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer (Reader’s Digest, March 2006).  That is precisely what the book of Ecclesiastes is all about.  All the money and wisdom and pleasure and significance you gain from what you do and what you pursue cannot truly satisfy. 

 

Life is like a treadmill.  Some people think treadmills are a fun way to get some exercise. I personally don’t like treadmills.  Treadmills are an exercise in futility.  I walk and walk and walk, and I don’t get anywhere.   All that work, all that energy expended, and what do you have to show for it?  Nothing.  For many people, religion feels like running on a treadmill; they're working hard but getting nowhere.

 

So where does this leave us? Flopping down on the treadmills of life, under the burden of despair and angst?   It might seem like it.  But in verse 10, a window of hope opens: “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. Yet He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.”

  

Here we see God making everything beautiful in its time. We see God setting eternity in our hearts.  We are made to yearn for something, not under the sun, but above the sun—something more than our present ticks of the clock and cycles of the seasons.  We have been made to yearn for God.  And we have also been made to have that yearning satisfied.  Christ is not only the eternity we yearn for; He’s also the only one who brings meaning to our “hours and days and years and ages.”