"What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. [...] This also is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 2:22-23).
Ecclesiastes is the memoir of a great king (most likely King Solomon), a man who had everything he could have ever wanted but still felt that he had nothing at all. He writes in Ecclesiastes how he had incredible wisdom, endless wealth, work to last for a lifetime, even hundreds of people to share everything with. But none of that satisfied him. He was always left searching for more.
This is one of the underlying themes of Ecclesiastes: the unending pursuit of more that plagues humanity. We can all relate to this. We spend our days living for the next thing, hoping that this will be the day we get that promotion, this will be the month our hard work finally pays off, this will be the year we gain that relationship.
But as the author of Ecclesiastes observed, all of these things are like chasing after wind. We see the wind all around us, and we long to grasp it, to bend it to our will and exult in our success. But wind is unattainable. It is always everywhere and nowhere, always swirling around us just out of reach.
So it is with the pursuit of more. When will we stop and realize that yesterday's more is today's reality? When will we give up the chase and be content with what we already have? When will "more" become "enough"?
God has given us our lives, and it is good to do the best we can with them. But when the pursuit of the best becomes the end in itself, we've missed the point. "More" is infinite. Chasing after it could last as long as we live.
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