“What satisfies my heart?…” That question plowed headlong into my life as I read this chapter. The writer, Solomon, chased after everything at full-tilt. He ran after all manner of human pleasure. He built great endeavors. He studied and studied some more. Ultimately everything he tried came up empty; none of it satisfied him within. And so he bounced from one experience to the next. Nothing in the end satisfied. “Meaningless,” he writes. All was meaningless. My take is that nothing satisfied that yearning within.
I see that all around me, people want bigger, better, more. Yet when they get bigger, better, more, it never seems to satisfy. If anything it leads to a desire for yet Bigger, Better, More.
This chapter is an unnerving read. Maybe not on Solomon’s grand scale, yet I fall prey to a similar insatiability for more and better and bigger. It can be a dangerous never-ending treadmill.
Towards the chapters’ end, verse 24 in particular, an answer seems to begin emerging. Like a Polaroid picture, it is not yet fully developed. Nonetheless an answer seems to be emerging… A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. …
I hear in this thought the lone word, ‘contentment.’ Be content with the basics of life, be satisfied with what you have been given.
Lord, grow contentment in me, a satisfaction with what I have and a delight that Your hand has provided it. Curb in me the insatiability of more and better and bigger. Lord, all too well I know that they lead to striving and dissatisfaction and worry and pressure and … all kinds of life qualities that neither honor You or others nor give me peace within.
I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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