Reflections on Ecclesiastes 3:11-14

If you want to read the text in its entirety, just click on the title of the blog. For those of you who don't want to be having to click back to the entire section, I'll insert the particular verses as I go along...

I was sitting in the local middle-class crack house Starbucks yesterday, settling in for my morning hit cuppa Joe, fulling intending on working on some reading I have to do for my Gospels class. Instead, I felt the need to be in the Word. As usual, I didn't really know where to start. When I'm in one of those moods, I start from Psalms and work from there. Before I even got to Psalms, I got snagged in Ecclesiastes. Here are some reflections of mine from this passage...

I love the simplicity of life in vv. 12-13. Right now I'm struggling with different things, and I seem to have to make every single thing a matter of spirituality, morality, or some other heavy category. I'm not taking joy in many of the things I have in my life. The simplicity of being happy and doing good almost seems too easy. (Sidebar: a friend of mine recently said she was "focusing on being relaxed and groovy." She totally is to begin with, and she seems to easy going and happy. I want relaxed and groovy! I'm so tired of being high-strung and stressed out!! But I digress...) This is a good reminder to lighten up and take each day for the blessing that it truly is -- Lord knows that, if anyone, I can understand the concept of, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may."

The first sentence of v. 11 has a different meaning to me today. To back up just a little, vv. 1-8 is the famous passage which talks about there being an appropriate space in time for all things to transpire. The way in which I'm hearing v. 11 differently today is in that God's timing is the key to beauty and goodness. Allowing things to transpire on His economy of time, rather than my own, is what yields goodness and blessings. I can sum this up for you in one word: TRUST. It is soooo hard for me to do this with God, or anyone else for that matter, even though it is what I truly desire.

Lastly, I'm seeing a connection between the last half of v. 11 and v. 14. God so clearly wants our love, respect, and reverence. It is so clear to me that God is Creator (among many other things) that I cannot understand why others don't understand what I read in the same way that I understand it. And then, when asked to explain it to them, it's near impossible -- it's like trying to describe the taste of water or the color of air. We are created with a desire in our hearts to understand God, given a "foggy knowledge" of "now" and "later," but we are also created to have some dependence upon God -- this is faith. To deny the need for faith in our lives is to not fully understand or appreciate how we have been created, in my limited understanding. God will receive glory in all things, and our dependence upon Him gives Him the spotlight on center stage to do just that -- be glorified in and through us.

Wow. How is it that I've read this passage before but never understood it this way?!?