I love the book of Ecclesiastes - it’s such a stark contrast to the book of Proverbs that it’s really a slap in the face for it to be:

• written by the same guy that wrote most of Proverbs; and
• the book immediately after Proverbs.

And it’s filled with such a powerful message - Solomon, having sampled and pursued everything this world has to offer, concludes that the pursuit most fulfilling and meaningful to the soul is the pursuit of God.

I love the book - it meanders through deep philosophies of nihilism, fatalism, existentialism, post-modernism (yes it does), hedonism, narcissism, wise-ass-ism, and ends up squarely faced with a God beyond belief. Literally.

I’ve read the book several times (primarily because it’s actually a short book, a quick read), and I just finished reading it through again this week as part of my journey through the Old Testament. And, as I have experienced during my previous sojourns in the book, this week I’ve found my soul being soothed and amused and inspired and becalmed by the sometimes-melancholy and sometimes-downright-hilarious rants of the old Teacher who wrote the book.

For example:

There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good. This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God. For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him?

And, hilariously sarcastic:

I have seen everything during my lifetime of futility; there is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his wickedness.

Do not be excessively righteous and do not be overly wise. Why should you ruin yourself? Do not be excessively wicked and do not be a fool. Why should you die before your time?

And, the best is saved for the last, the ending of the book:

The words of wise men are like goads, and masters of these collections are like well-driven nails; they are given by one Shepherd. But beyond this, my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body.

The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.

However, this morning my half-asleep brain stumbled into chapters 10 and 11. These seem to be quasi-random sprinklings of almost zen-like sayings that make one go “huh?????” Don’t get me wrong - much of Proverbs is like that too, and I’ve come to appreciate zen-like sayings as a result because there really is so much wisdom and meaning packed into their mysterious structure. Those kinds of sayings have the effect of making one spend deeper time with God as one meditates and reflects on them to understand what God may be saying through them - instead of having it neatly packaged and spoon-fed to you with large words that someone else defines.

Chapter 11, however, seems to have been perplexing enough that the folks at the publishing companies for most Bible translations whose job it is to come up with the pithy little chapter headings for each chapter seem to have simply given up and settled on “The bread on the waters” as the best they could do to summarize the chapter.

But, I digress. Here is verse 3 from chapter 11, the Spirit-inspired verse of the day:

If the clouds are full, they pour out rain upon the earth; and whether a tree falls toward the south or toward the north, wherever the tree falls, there it lies.

Okay, now, before you go bemoaning the inanity of easy-to-read Bible translations, that’s not from the New Living Translation or the New International Version. That, my friends, is from the N.A.S.B., which I happen to love because it doesn’t make any bones about translating words literally without regard to easy sentence structure. I love reading the sentences in the NASB because they read very closely to the kind of Arabic/Middle-Eastern thinking patterns I grew up with, and while some feel the NASB to be hard to understand, I actually really find it resonates with my soul… for the most part. One of the things I like about the NASB is that for many words it provides a little footnote that tries to convey the exact literal meaning of the word, many times conveying a deeper nuance to the verse than the generally accepted translation.

And, sure enough, there’s a footnote for the word “lies” in the above verse, but all it says is: “lit: there it is“.

In other words:

… whether a tree falls toward the south or toward the north, wherever the tree falls, there it is.

Okay. Come on, fess up, which one of you jokers put fortune cookies in my Bible?

Well, it’s been a few weeks since we got back from a whirlwind trip out to California!

It was such a good trip… we were really reluctant to come back here… wow, such good weather, such a different place.

Overall, the place just had such a different and pleasant vibe compared to the vibe here in stressed-out uptight New England. LA and environs just seemed so much more… relaxed.

Pictures are on our gallery page: http://gallery.kumarmail.com
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The story behind my awkward attempt at poetry is as follows:

Recently Alexis and I were on a business trip to California – well, I was on business, while she enjoyed the sunny California weather – and at the end of the trip we got to do some fun sightseeing. However, on the last night of the trip, Alexis suddenly had severe abdominal pains that kept her up all night.

This was the fourth time this has happened to her over the past year - the first time it happened was while we were visiting friends in Maine, and on that occassion we spent several hours in the ER of the local hospital only to have the pain go away on its own. Subsequent doctor’s visits and MRI scans revealed nothing of obvious cause. And now it struck again on the night before we were supposed to hop on a plane and make the long cross-country trek back home.

At one point in the night, as I was puzzling about what to do, she asked me to simply pray for her. She felt that it might be a spiritual attack, so I started praying. As I prayed, though, I began to realize that Jesus was trying to teach us something about prayer. It hit me like a ton of bricks that while I have been a Christian for several years, and while I have an intellectual awareness of the divinity of Christ, I actually am very reluctant to pray, specifically, to Him. I’m comfortable praying to God, the Father, but somehow I only tend to pray to Jesus in crisis.

So I started praying to Jesus, and as I did so the prayer took on a different dynamic – it was becoming uncomfortably personal, relational, and for me, as a socially-challenged engineer, I realized that I didn’t really know what to do with the person of Jesus. It was awkward, but I kept praying.

My wife’s pain started subsiding, and she was able to doze off for a little while. However, when I dozed off too, the pains came back. We kept praying on and off through the night until my wife fell asleep in the mid-morning and slept through most of the day. Eventually she was well enough to make the return flight, although in considerable pain, but we got home safely thanks to the protection of Jesus on the journey.

Meanwhile I reflected on the weirdness of the situation. I’m skeptical of prayer-healings and, again, as a semi-rational modern engineer, I tend to be leery of spiritual warfare and spectacular reports of victory. And, let me hasten to clarify: my wife didn’t get miraculously cured. However, there was *something* about her pain that seemed to run away when we prayed aloud to Jesus. Even as I write this I struggle with communicating the experience without making it seem like a plastic formula for victory, especially since I know many of you have much deeper personal experiences with illness, either your own or a closely loved one.

So, the eye-opening lesson for me wasn’t one of how to manipulate Jesus to get a particular result, it was more like a wake up call: Jesus gently reminding me that the point is to be in relation with Him all the time, in all circumstances, just as the disciples were.

that is the question… (with apologies to the bard)

It seems like we Christians spend a lot of time worrying about what not to do rather than on what we could be doing instead. That is really a tragedy. It would already be a tragedy if we only worried about us, but the greater tragedy is we worry obsessively about what others ought not to be doing rather than encouraging them in what they could be doing.

In fact, it can be argued we spend a lot more time worrying and gossiping about what other people ought not to be doing than what we ourselves ought not to be doing… Such a tragedy of hypocritical travesties…
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