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A Hope for Something New

It's been a while since I last posted. Though I missed blogging and felt an internal pressure to write, I decided to not give in to my inner critic and took a break. I was still reading my Bible and finished reading Proverbs, however, my joy in getting up early in the morning waned. I am going to experiment with some other times in the day to see what will work for me now. Over the past year I have learned and accepted that I'm not a creature of habit. I love to hop around and multitask and dive into different projects. With this in mind, it kind of makes sense that my attempt at keeping to a regular schedule of getting up at 5 am would not last forever. 😂 Because of my struggle with this, my practice of writing down my thoughts and doing a deep dive to understand what I was reading slowly stopped. I missed the deep dive and I hope with recreating my schedule, I can do some more writing and then some more blogging. Anyone else have this same struggle with trying to stick to a good habit when it becomes too routine?

So, what am I reading now? Well, it's pretty easy to guess... nothing super fancy - no jumping around to create an overarching theme. It's Ecclesiastes, the book after Proverbs. Ecclesiastes is such an interesting book to me. It talks about wisdom, our never ending struggles as humans, and our collective short-term memory. It resolves with a reliance and hope in God as the factor that brings meaning to our vain existence.

The first chapter has an assumption that sets the melancholy tone of the beginning of the book. "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever." (Ecclesiastes 1:4) The earth abideth forever. This is an assumption that we all make until we learn and believe that God will one day put an end to the earth as we know it. Upon Jesus' return, new life will cease and we will all be ushered into an eternity. There will be no new generations. No continuing of the earth. There will be a newly created earth - heaven, where the righteous alive and dead will live. (Revelation 21)

If we have this assumption, it's easy to see why the book is so melancholy. It's hard to see the same world problems, and see people grapple with the same internal problems and not think - it's all pointless, it's all a vanity, it's all depressing! However, our knowledge about God's Word and our faith in his promise that Jesus will return and start something new, gives us the endurance and hope to see pass the repetitiveness and try to endure. (John 14)

I am excited to dive deep into Ecclesiastes and see our world through the writer's eyes. It's going to be wonderful coming to the same resolution that our hope in Jesus brings meaning to our meaninglessness.

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