Ecclesiastes 2:22-26
Looking at Life
22 What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? 23 All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless.
24 A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, 25 for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? 26 To the person who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Solomon looked at life in Ecclesiastes and wrote a most interesting book about life, working, and the toil of living...The hand of God is around us, but do we miss His Hand, His Presence in our daily lives?...What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun?...All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest...This too is meaningless...Ants, too, scurry and march around in order, keep busy, and get much done, or so it seems -but do they?...
Henry David Thoreau said "It is not enough to be busy...So are the ants...The question is: What are we busy about?"...
We can often go through life so busy that it seems like we miss much of it...And years later we wonder where all the years have gone...
Thoreau also said, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."...
There are some of us who are so caught up in our thoughts that that too is living and a way of life...We miss what is going on around us...Life can be lived, in such a way that we do not even notice what is around us...And thus many moments in life are missed...We are not often aware of the present moment in which we live, because we are thinking about something else...So we can go through life in our own thoughts, instead of experiencing those things which actually are around us...Let us remember that God is not far from us, without Him we can find no permanent joy...