Hi John and everyone. The day before we started Ecclesiastes I got bored with reading about Solomon (again) and so skipped ahead and read Ecclesiastes from start to finish. And everyday when you post the links to last year’s commentary I am reading them all. It’s very enlightening.
One thing mentioned was a book, Living Life Backwards, and I loaded it to my Kindle app and started reading that too. The book makes the point that really death—the fact that there is an ending—makes everything in life more meaningful, and special.
About thirty years ago I went through a period of my life that I have labeled “the dying time”. In a period of eight years when I was in my 40’s I lost my husband and practically all of my older relatives: mother, stepfather, both my grandmothers, and an aunt and a great aunt both of whom I was very close to. My mother in law also had a catastrophic stroke in the same period. Everyone I knew well and loved was gone. I made a decision coming out of that time that relationships with my siblings and children were the most important things in my life and I was always going to make an extra effort to visit them, talk to them and be close to them. And I have continued to do that. In the face of death, my relationships with the people I love matter more to me than anything else.
Another thing I have thought about in reading Ecclesiastes is, over long periods of time, who gets remembered. From two thousand years ago, Jesus is probably the most remembered person. Probably if you had asked someone in Europe or the Middle East at that time, they would have thought the Emperor Augustus would be the most likely to be remembered. Other people from long ago that most people would know about probably include the Buddha and Mohammed. Thinking of important people of the world, there are not too many with instant name recognition. Maybe Julius Caesar? Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? There are probably others, but whole civilizations have gone to dust and we know very little about them.
I’m not sure how to end this. Just that doing our best in the time and place we exist and spending time with the people we love matter.
Hi John and everyone. The day before we started Ecclesiastes I got bored with reading about Solomon (again) and so skipped ahead and read Ecclesiastes from start to finish. And everyday when you post the links to last year’s commentary I am reading them all. It’s very enlightening.
One thing mentioned was a book, Living Life Backwards, and I loaded it to my Kindle app and started reading that too. The book makes the point that really death—the fact that there is an ending—makes everything in life more meaningful, and special.
About thirty years ago I went through a period of my life that I have labeled “the dying time”. In a period of eight years when I was in my 40’s I lost my husband and practically all of my older relatives: mother, stepfather, both my grandmothers, and an aunt and a great aunt both of whom I was very close to. My mother in law also had a catastrophic stroke in the same period. Everyone I knew well and loved was gone. I made a decision coming out of that time that relationships with my siblings and children were the most important things in my life and I was always going to make an extra effort to visit them, talk to them and be close to them. And I have continued to do that. In the face of death, my relationships with the people I love matter more to me than anything else.
Another thing I have thought about in reading Ecclesiastes is, over long periods of time, who gets remembered. From two thousand years ago, Jesus is probably the most remembered person. Probably if you had asked someone in Europe or the Middle East at that time, they would have thought the Emperor Augustus would be the most likely to be remembered. Other people from long ago that most people would know about probably include the Buddha and Mohammed. Thinking of important people of the world, there are not too many with instant name recognition. Maybe Julius Caesar? Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? There are probably others, but whole civilizations have gone to dust and we know very little about them.
I’m not sure how to end this. Just that doing our best in the time and place we exist and spending time with the people we love matter.
Thanks for sharing all that, Katey!
Wow, Katey. What am experience to go through. Thank God you used it as a lesson for LIFE, one we can all agree with and learn from.