This week, Cindy is dealing with the death of a lifelong friend. We are in our 70’s and this is getting to be a common experience. I am beginning to reflect on life……..my life…….and on what it means…….or in a few years……..what it meant. I am beginning to see that the most important metric of my life…….and yours is meaning. So……..what is “meaning?”
It turns out that the definition of a “meaningful life” is surprisingly hard to pin down. We go through our day working at hundreds of tasks, each of which has a short-term goal. But, these short-term goals do not determine the worth of our life. That is determined by the totality of our life. When we add it all up at the end, we want to have lived a meaningful life.
To explore meaning as it applies to our lives, I want to contrast two lives…….Solomon……..and Jesus.
Solomon
He was a son of King David and was himself king of Israel. He was arguably the most successful human being to ever live. He was the embodiment of wisdom. He had power. He had lots of stuff. He had hundreds of wives and thousands of children. He was respected the world over. People came from all over just to sit at his feet. But, when you look closely, you realize that every metric that he used to weigh the successes of his life was limited to the temporal/physical world. He was a Jew. He built the temple in Jerusalem. He believed in God. But, if you look closely…….he didn’t have much in the way of a relationship……..a conversation……with God. At the end of his life, he wrote a review assessing the quality of his life. That review is the book of Ecclesiastes. If Solomon had given his life a rating in “stars” at the end of Ecclesiastes………it would be a one-star review.
“meaningless…….a chasing after the wind”
Something here just doesn’t add up.
Jesus
He, too, was a descendant of David…….at least in the legal terms of the day. He spent most of his life as a tradesman. He studied the Torah. He accumulated nothing except what he carried on his person. He had no wife. He had no children. But he did have a following. By the metrics of the temporal/physical world, he was not a successful man. But, what he did have was an intimate, minute by minute, relationship with God……the father……his father. After his death, he returned to his father and became united with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. And there is the key difference between Jesus and Solomon. The meaningfulness of Jesus’s life flows out of his relationship with the Father and with the Holy Spirit. The meaningfulness of Jesus’s life is measured by the metrics of the spiritual realm.
So……how does this apply to me……..in my search for meaning in my life?
I can run my life using the metrics of Solomon. In point of fact…….I have. It’s been fun. I have stuff. But meaningfulness? When I breathe my last breath, will my temporal/physical successes translate into meaningfulness? I have grave doubts.
Or
I can try to run my life using the metrics of the spiritual realm:
Talk to God
Listen to the Father
Listen to the Holy Spirit
Serve God
Give God priority over my appetites
In a word……..love……..love God and everyone else
I am certain that if I can do these things, at least some of the time, I will be able to say to myself………as I breathe my last breath:
My life had meaning.
the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless !”
Solomon, looking back at his temporal life, Ecclesiastes 12:7-8 NIV