This next chapter explores the ‘vanity’, to use the teacher’s word, of living a life of self-indulgence, of living a life with wisdom, and living a life of toil (hard work).

We’ll just bite them off one at a time in our reading.

In these first 11 verses, we hear that this guy has lived a life where he had everything...alcohol, property, servants, women, riches, and everything else he could possibly have wanted or had...he literally had it all.  And it wasn’t enough to satisfy that striving that was in him.

For me, that raises questions for me...like, am I content?  Is this desire to have more something that lives in me?  I don’t think everyone struggles with this, but do I?  What do I really think it will take to make me content?  How do I really push back against this particular issue, this insatiable desire to acquire?

One thing that is really easy to skip past or to discount in reading scripture like this, when we don’t know the writers personally, when we can’t really completely appreciate them fully because the divide between their life and ours is just so big, is that we miss that they really are far more like us than they are different.  In other words, it is far more reasonable for me to assume that if I were writing these words, and if I had everything just like this author, that I would feel the same way - it is more reasonable to assume that to be true than to assume that I would be different.  Which means, if I had everything, it wouldn’t be ‘enough’ to satisfy the quest for more.

The only thing I have been able to come up with that helps me when I spot this desire to acquire running rampant in me is the practice of gratitude, of pausing and just reflecting on how blessed I am, on how much I have, on the people in my life.  In reflecting like this, it shifts me from a mode of “I want” and into a mode of gratitude.  It isn’t permanent, so it is a practice that must be upheld, a habit to be built.  I am never going to be in the position this teacher was in, with literally everything, so the only way I can truly embrace this reality is through trusting that he got it right...but I can definitely say that they acquisition of more ‘stuff’ in my life really hasn’t produced more happiness.  Once you have enough so you don’t feel threatened financially, we have to begin to embrace a life of gratitude.  Great reminder this morning!