"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."
It catches your attention. You wonder what this book is going to be about. The next couple of chapters is this King explaining everything he has. He talks about the riches, the power, the women, everything that he wanted, and he says that it is all vanity. Everything! He talks about how he now sees that it means nothing, everything is meaningless. A message that most of us read past and not think twice about. But what if we did think about it, what if we really considered these words and didn't just pass them off as everything else, what if we let them penetrate deep, so deep it transforms us.
I live in a society that is run on power. A society that is in the pursuit of happiness, but seems to being looking in all the wrong places. The American dream is a term I have heard my whole life, a term that defined what true happiness would be. The American dream as defined by my eleventh grade environmental science teacher is: a family containing, two parents(happily married of course), two children(one boy and one girl preferably), a pet is usually thrown in the mix, a decent size house, an income that is over 60,000 a year, and life in the beautiful suburbia. That sounds like a life that I could live without, but for some reason I like many other Americans was convinced that I wanted it all. Right after high school I was in pursuit of this happiness, I went to a nice private college on a scholarship (the tuition however still cost me an arm and a leg) and was studying to be what every intelligent person should be, a doctor. After a few months of this pursuit, God spoke to me and changed my life, and as you may know I am no where near that pursuit anymore. The moment God spoke to me He revealed to me that my life was to be devoted to Him and nothing else, that I no longer needed to seek after these things, but I needed to seek after Him and He would provide the rest.
I have now realized that this pursuit of happiness that we have all been a victim of has come out of the society that we live in, and it is kind of funny to think that we cling to the ideals of this society, even after we see how corrupt it is. We live in a society that is selfish and so focused on power. This society has ruined the rest of the world, it has made the world we live in oppressed and starving. We hear about all the issues in other countries, slaves, human trafficking, starvation, extreme poverty, the list goes on and on and we don't even consider why these issues are so huge or why they still exist. It is the demand. It is a society that no longer runs on what it needs, but what it wants. I live in a country that spends 358 billion dollars during Christmas time on presents that aren't a necessity, while only 10 billion dollars would provide water for the whole world. Sex trade is run on men from the western society that have this 'need' for sex. There are people that live in extreme poverty because the only jobs they can get pay 3 dollars a day, by an industry like the coffee industry. The western world is run on these addictions, these wants, that we think are needs and it effects all of society.
If we want to believe it or not our society is effected by this selfishness as well! Today I watched an episode of 30 Days, the whole episode was about living on minimum wage in society today (if you want to watch it type '30 days minimum wage' in google and search videos). In the episode there was this guy that talked about how he struggles with living making minimum wage and he said that 'we live in a society that is set up to tear families apart'. A statistic that was mention in the show said that a majority of families that suffer from divorce have an income of less than 50,000 dollars a year. Another issue in our society is the criminal rate for people who live near or below the poverty line. Also the amount of fair health care provided in this country is minute compared to other western countries. You would think that the richest country in the world would have the funds to provide for it population, but the world is just not what we think it is.
A few weeks ago I watched the Village for the first time. I avoided watching it because I had so many people tell me it wasn't that great, and the ending was the worse. I watched not expecting much, but in the end I was so pleased. The movie had such a strong message that I think many had missed. The movie demonstrated how simplicity works. How we don't need money or power or politics. The tiny community that they had didn't have money, but they still survived. It didn't have one person in charge, but a group of people. It was a community that cared for everyone. A community that communed with each other, no one was left out. There were no crimes, there was no prison, there were no people that went without, they all did their share of work to make the whole village function.
We have the issues in our society because this desire for power. The fall of man was out of the desire to know the things that God knows, to be more like God. A book I recommend to everyone is Frankenstein, most people think of the black and white movie and some weird monster, but it is a story about the consequences of trying to be like God, Shelly(the author) wrote it as a warning, that we obviously didn't get. We have this idea that makes us believe that the more money we have or the more knowledge we have or the better the job we have or the more power we have will makes us happier, but it all goes back to Ecclesiastes, the writer had all these things, he had everything you could imagine, but he soon realized that it all was meaningless. The message that Ecclesiastes gives by the end is God is the only thing that isn't meaningless, that He is the only thing that has meaning, the only thing that matters.
As Christians in western society, our pursuit of happiness should be the pursuit of God. We should not set our standards of a good life on what society tells us it is. We should seek the Kingdom first. We should live like aliens, like the people in the village(I am not saying to move a bunch of people into the middle of the woods and make them afraid of fake monsters), but we should live in true community, to demonstrate what it means to love our neighbors. We need to not get sucked into the ways of the world, but see we are meant to live by a different standard.
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