Hello friends and pilgrams! Tomorrow I am off to Alaska for spring break. See ya when I get back. That is, if my plane doesn't crash into a mountain or something.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
"See, this is new"?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.

-Ecclesiastes 1:2-11.

These verses have been flowing through my mind for the last few days along with Lamentations chapter four. What intrigues me most is the amount of despair mixed with beauty within these verses. How can a subject saturated in despondency be written in such a way as to inspire hope?

My pastor has been preaching on these verses over the last few weeks and has opened my eyes to a wonderful understanding of this text. Solomon seems to writing in a “horizontal” plane. He seems to be writing about what Life is without God. “Vanity of vanities! All is Vanity.” Without God what “does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?”

As sinners, all men seem to feel this in there very being. Dejection and fear is a constant theme within us, and as our lives undulate through the waves of time we keep coming back to this bleak state.

When in this state I find comfort in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism:

What is thy only comfort in life and death?

Answer. That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

I thank God that through Christ we have hope. That is not hope in what we have, but hope in what will be. Hope that one day “when the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’

‘O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?’”