Recently, a blogger attempted to describe my blog and had a hard time figuring it out because of my blog description, which is a quote from Ecclesiastes:

“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…There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?” (Ecclesiastes 2:22-25)

I choose Ecclesiastes because I thought it reflected what I wanted to do with this blog. But I haven’t figured out a way to explain what I mean by that. Ecclesiastes is a commentary on life, just as this blog is. It is meant to force us to ask: what are we doing with this life that we have been given by God?
In many ways Ecclesiastes is a sad book because the author looks back over his life and realizes that it was pretty empty, it was all vanity and striving after the wind. That there was nothing to show for it; all the things that he did and all the possessions that he acquired really meant nothing.
When I created this blog and I decided to call it Life Under the Sun, I wanted to focus, not on the hopeless aspect of the phrase even though it is used to convey the toil of life under the sun but on the hope that is occasionally evident in Ecclesiastes. I knew that there was hope in Ecclesiastes, it wasn’t just unrelenting bitterness over a misspent youth. There was wisdom there, not just in an understanding of the toil of life under the sun which the author experienced. It wasn’t just wisdom gained from experiencing the toil and frustrations of this life, it was an understanding of the God given joy when we acknowledge our Creator. There is hope that when you live your life in an appreciation for the Creator and a joy in His creation, life can be filled with joy and gladness.
That was in my mind when I chose the verse, that even though life under the sun is a toil and that we are usually striving after the wind and that everything is vanity of vanities, even though all that’s true, we know that we can find joy in the Lord and that renews us and fills us with hope and purpose.
It’s a new way to look at the world, one that many don’t share or understand. I want to use this blog to share my view of life, a view of life from someone who realizes that life can’t be viewed from any other perspective except through the understanding of eternity because all of our life is pointed in that direction. We are designed by the Creator to glorify Him but we have rebelled against that knowledge though secretly, in the back of our minds, we know what our job is and we keep filling our lives with emptiness to fill the void that we have created by denying the love, worship and awe that we were created to give to our Creator. We strive after the wind to distract ourselves from the knowledge that we aren’t doing the thing that we were created to do.
It has been said that the unexamined life is not worth living and that is true but the life that has not been lived to the glory of God is a wasted life. Qoheleth (the author of Ecclesiastes — it means teacher)knew that, it’s the point of Ecclesiastes.