True Life (eBook)

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Life Is Uncontrollable

When Nicole’s children were little, they loved riding in the special grocery store cart with the car attached to the front. Tori and Sophie would clamber into the little car with all the enthusiasm of a couple of sixteen-year-olds sporting newly minted licenses. They loved feeling all grown-up, having a job to do; and they did it with gusto. Their chubby hands gripped the wheel. Their arms, like a pair of pistons, pumped incessantly. Big smiles illuminated their little faces. They reveled in the illusion that they were steering Mommy for once, turning the car this way and that, up and down the aisles.

Sometimes we have the same idea, driving through life in our brightly colored cars with shiny plastic wheels. We think we’re steering this life thing pretty well, carefully turning down one aisle after another, all according to our plans. Then life veers down the cat litter aisle when we were aiming for the candy aisle. We’re puzzled and dismayed: I never meant to go that direction! What’s happening? What did I do wrong? Why isn’t life going the way I planned?

In Ecclesiastes, it’s as if Solomon leans his head down, taps the top of the little car, and speaks a few words of truth into our ideas about life in the real world. Life, he explains, is a bit like trying to steer the toy car on the front of the grocery cart. You may think that you’re in control, but in reality you’re not. Solomon gets straight to the point: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2).

Solomon tells us what navigating life is really like for everyone, no exceptions. It is all vanity for all y’all. And not just vanity, but vanity of vanities, like the Holy of Holies or Song of Songs. The phrase uses superlative language, the ancient equivalent of an all-caps text. Then Solomon completes the triad: “All is vanity.” Nothing is not vanity. In fact, he repeats the word for “vanity” no fewer than thirty-eight times in Ecclesiastes, and he concludes the book with the same phrase, forming a kind of frame for the entire work. In other words: “Get this! It’s my main point!”

Incomprehensible and Uncontrollable

The English word “vanity” doesn’t capture all that Solomon is saying here. The word in Hebrew is hevel. It means “vapor” or “breath.” Merest of breaths. It is, in effect, “the waste product of breathing.”1 It’s the air you expel when you exhale. You even push a breath out when you say the word aloud. Hevel. That’s life. It’s the air you send out into the atmosphere. Invisible, expendable, ephemeral. Not even a yawn. So to read it properly you might say: “Merest breath, said the Preacher, merest breath. All is mere breath.”2

We certainly don’t think of our lives as a mere breath. A journey or a battle or an adventure? Sure. But a breath? Hardly the metaphor we would have chosen to represent the meaning and significance of our lives. “Vaporous!” certainly doesn’t resonate or inspire. There’s nothing heart-warming about the idea of life as a mere emission of carbon dioxide. And yet, this is the picture Solomon gives us.

Here’s the thing about a breath: try as you might, you can’t grasp it. You can’t hold onto it, not even for a second. Like your physical beauty, which is “vain”—there’s that word hevel again—you can’t keep it (Prov. 31:30). A mere breath is not a thing you can grasp tangibly and clutch between your hands. And you cannot grasp it intellectually either. What does the breath we exhale mean anyway? What is the significance of a sigh? How many breaths will we take in our lifetime? There’s no way we can possibly plan or decide or know. Breath eludes us, as does all of life. In other words, life is incomprehensible and uncontrollable. It’s beyond our ability to understand or manage. This is reality. We can’t seize the wheel of life and steer our own course with the top down and the wind in our hair. Neither can we explain life with a string of clever memes. Like a toddler in a grocery car, navigating life is beyond our comprehension and outside our control. This is the way life truly is.

The Illusion of Control

Evidence of our lack of control abounds, whether we realize it or not. Think about it: How often does life go contrary to what you expect or plan? You believe God helped you find a great house in a great neighborhood, only you couldn’t sell your current home, and the contract fell through. The new guy at church seems godly, and maybe even interested in you, but then he asked your roommate out on a date. Perhaps you worked hard to get a small business off the ground, only for it to go under despite your best efforts. Or you tried to give all your children the same affection and opportunities, but one of them still struggles to make his way in the world.

Most of us don’t interpret setbacks and reversals as Solomon did. When things don’t go the way we planned or hoped, we’re confused or disconsolate. But how should we think about disappointments, really? Solomon says the ability to manage the outcome of your work, relationships, and circumstances was never in your control in the first place. All the times things did go the way you planned were only your illusion of control. You only thought you were managing things while, like the child in the grocery car, you have no real control over the direction your life takes. Not a pleasant thought at first, but it is reality. Everything is hevel, remember? It’s a breath.

“What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” James 4:14

The Default Setting: Brief, Baffling, Bad

Years ago, slander and false accusations wreaked havoc on our family and ministry. Godly reputations were destroyed, Christian fellowship was broken, and the slander laid waste to years of fruitful ministry. At the time, we thought our lives might as well have careened off the road and plunged over a cliff. But our expectations of the way life was supposed to go needed to be adjusted. Our illusion that we could manage life (if we worked hard and obeyed God), or that we could figure it all out (if we diligently searched the Scriptures and got counsel from other believers), needed to be stripped away. Ecclesiastes brought us the comfort of knowing that our experience was not unique to the Christian. The fact is: all of life is vanity for all of us.

Trouble and trials, envy and betrayal, setbacks and sorrow are all part of the treacherous terrain we travel through life on our way to death. Brief, baffling, and bad are normal conditions for life’s journey. We can’t control how long or short our lives will be; we can’t fathom why things do or don’t happen the way they do; and we can’t take a detour around life’s hazardous roads. The unexpected is exactly what we should expect from life here, in Solomon’s words, “under the sun” (Eccles. 1:3).

Stop Making Life So Hard on Yourself

We hope you can begin to see the relevance of this little book of the Old Testament. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon breaks into our frantic and futile efforts to control the uncontrollable, to comprehend the incomprehensible, and he gives us some advice: life is gonna be hard, so stop making it so hard on yourself. What is the point, Solomon asks, of trying to control people and circumstances when your life is a mere breath? What is the point of gripping the wheel so tightly when it is not connected to the tires?

Only when you recognize that life is incomprehensible and uncontrollable can you actually enjoy the ride through the grocery store of life. You can sit...