The other day, the subject of generation-defining moments came up. Where were you when... JFK was assassinated, the Berlin Wall came down, the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, the stock market fell so rapidly in the past couple years? The thing about grief is that it creates this feeling like "I wish I could go back to the day before all this happened." Ecclesiastes 7 addresses that feeling, letting us know that questions like "Why were things better before" is not a wise question (7:10). Going back, as this blog has mentioned before, is simply not possible. Trying is like running on a treadmill, you're trying to go back and the world is going forward. In the end you're just stuck in one spot.
The Fruit of the Spirit includes patience, as does this passage in Ecclesiastes 7. We rarely know how the Spirit is going to work things out so that "the end of a matter is better than its beginning" (7:8), but patience is built on radical trust in God. Patience is built on spiritual practice, of waiting and watching, and of a deep understanding of who God is. The kind of deep understanding that comes between two friends who can finish each others answers, the kind of deep understanding that comes between a couple in love. I hope we can grow in that kind of understanding.
Oh, and what do take away from Ecclesiastes 7:16-17?
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