What I love about the writer of Ecclesiastes is the way its writer starts out so grumpy and is-there-anything-new-under-the-sun cynical – “As everyone comes, so they depart, and what do they gain, since they toil for the wind” (5:18) – yet ends up affirming what he once disdained: “I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun” (8:15).
Maybe, he realizes, he needs to lighten up. That’s captured in the famous words we know so well: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” (3:1). Maybe I need to lighten up, too. If there is a time for everything, then maybe I can get over how important I think I am, worrying about and managing things for everyone. Maybe I really can get out from under the cloud of my list. You too, perhaps?
This message is excerpted from “All in good time” by Anne Basye in the May/June 2023 Gather magazine. Today we commemorate Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543; Leonhard Euler, 1783; scientists.
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