Tuesday, November 5, 2024

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READ: Ecclesiastes 8

So I commended enjoyment because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, for this will accompany him in his labor during the days of his life that God gives him under the sun. Ecclesiastes 8:15 (CSB)

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I remember sitting in my office at church one day when my boss, Kris, walked by and stuck his nose in my office. I don’t know what came over me, but I declared, “Kris I have discovered the secret to productivity.” 

He was interested in my insight. 

Until I told him my insight. 

“I just do whatever I feel like doing until I’m up against a deadline and then I get all the other stuff done.” 

He was stuck you see, because that seemed like a terrible idea, but I was a very productive hard-working staff member. As I recall he gave me a tight smile, nodded his head, and backed out of my office. 

There’s a whole spate of literature devoted to personal and professional productivity. There’s time blocking, bullet journals, and even this thing where you get on a Zoom call with someone and just do your work while they do their work… then you say goodbye. And then there’s this idea called “eat the frog.” I saw somewhere that it came from Mark Twain who said something to the effect that if you have to eat a frog to survive just get it over with first. In productivity, eating the frog is doing the least desirable or hardest task first. 

Not me. I do the most fun thing first and then let the other stuff stack up until I have to work through chest pains to get it done while silently cursing my life. I figure with this philosophy I will have more fun most of the time and push through the pain for only a short time. 

I did this in University too, but differently. I was always a decent student – I have a killer short-term memory – but I hated a lot of my assignments. Then one day, I decided the reason I hated homework was because I was writing for my professors and not for me. I took immediate action. The next research paper I wrote, I had fun with. I made it entertaining. I remember Dr. Scott, my soils and vegetation professor writing, “Highly unusual style” on my paper and then giving me the same B+ I would have gotten if I had slogged through another pedestrian treatment of dirt and plants. 

Speaking of university, I remember the day I realized that my 82% mark in Anthropology would garner the same A as the student who worked their rear end off for a 95% because Anthropology didn’t have an A+ option. If all that studying would end in the same mark, why put in the extra effort? Especially when grade letter marks were the only thing that mattered.

This too was futility. 

Yesterday I was visiting with a group of Christian entrepreneurs and they were discussing the role of God in business. One of the group said that she didn’t know what to do because she was praying and praying and didn’t feel like God was giving her any direction. 

She didn’t look like she was having a good time in business at all. 

That too is futility. 

Look, if we can’t enjoy what we’re doing at least a lot of the time, we should seriously reflect on our lives. Now, here’s an interesting thing: the writer of Ecclesiastes goes to great lengths to point out that the righteous eventually pass away, and the wicked sometimes prosper. The truth is life has big ups and tummy-turning dips – but if you lose your sense of humour in it, if you take things too seriously if you can’t stop to have a tea party from time to time, you will die. 

At the very least you’ll start to lose your mind. 

Our world can change in the blink of an eye. What a shame if we spend it sweating and fretting and never doing fun things. What a shame if we lose our sense of humour that carries us through the hard stuff.