Before diving into chapter 5, let’s pause for a moment and think about where we’ve been here in Ecclesiastes.  We started with this idea that there is an author or writer of this work, and then there is the main character, the teacher, who is the one narrating things, speaking to us and giving us his insights about the life he’s lived.  We’ve seen several themes all centering on the vanity of setting up the meaning of life as being related to our work, to our enjoyment of life itself, our wisdom, or our attainment of ‘stuff’...meaning, the teacher is telling us that we can’t find satisfaction if that’s what our life is all about.  All of the while, we have this innate desire, this quest, to find meaning, so we are longing to find meaning and desire...it’s just that time will help us to realize that those things aren’t THE things on which to be focused.  That’s essentially what we’ve done to this point.

For today, I am just going to focus on verses 1-7 of chapter 5, as I feel like there is a great message buried in these verses that the teacher is giving us and that we can blow past if we aren’t careful.

Listen - I think it is pretty simple, listen...that’s the message of this section.  Fools speak too much.  Fools let everything fall out of their mouth without care for the effect their words have on the world around them.  Fools carry that into their prayer life as well, spitting off requests and orders to God.  Listen...speak less, listen more, ask questions instead of giving advise, seek to be interested instead of being interesting.  Seek to understand rather than to convince.

What would it look like if that was really our mantra?  What if I did really carried that mantra into my daily life?  What if I did it for a month?  Or even for a day?  What if my goal for the day was to try to extract as much information as possible by asking questions and leaning into what others are saying and I only offered opinions and advise when I was basically forced to do so.  What would happen to the level of understanding I would bring to the conversation?

So that’s my challenge today...to be a big time question-asker.  To see if what I can do in terms of information gathering.  And that’s how my prayer time will go this morning too...on my knees, in silence, waiting and listening.  It may be strange, and it may be silent, but I feel compelled in that way this morning.