NOT A BEETLE IN A BUCKET

The irony is, as I discovered anew on a road trip this week, we actually miss it and long to return to the security of it when out of it.. What's "it"? The endless, mundane routine our life settles into. Human existence consists of an endless cycle of repetition on every level. There is a same old, same old routine for a day, a week, a month, a year, and a lifetime. Even our planet has its routine. Consisting of personal hygiene, eating, working, sleeping, cooking, chores, maintenance, etc., cyclic routine is the norm for our lives. The Teacher of Ecclesiastes points this out in his opening remarks and shares his conclusion: This endless cycle of life, nothing ever new just a constant repeat of what has already been around, makes life meaningless, or more mildly put, boring. A ditch digger in Chicago a century or more ago pegged the feeling: "I dig the ditch to get the money to buy the food to get the strength to dig the ditch." Being a melancholy by temperament, I've thought a lot about this-life being reduced to the common denominator of an endless cycle of existence. It made me think of a beetle trapped at the bottom of a bucket. Looking for a way out and unable to climb the bucket's sides, that beetle will crawl around and around and around the inside circumference of that bucket until it dies. That is the description of human existence that we get from the Teacher. The beetle in a bucket analogy may have been darkly depressing, but I had a follow up vision: It came from trudging on through the despair of Ecclesiastes. There is a key phrase for understanding this book that describes the meaninglessness of life. It is "under the sun." Factoring in only the horizontal plane of human existence, only that which is "under the sun," life IS a meaningless cycle. You live. You die. That's all there is. But, stop! What if there is more to life than that which is "under the sun"? What if there is God, heaven, eternity? What if there is an "above the sun." And there is. Does that take the seemingly endless cycle out of life? No. But it does give life direction, meaning. Here is the second "vision" I had. Think of the spring coil that binds a spiral notebook. If you were to take it from the notebook and begin to trace your finger along the wire, your finger would go around and around. Yet, as you continued to hold the wire vertical and follow the cycles of the wire, your finger at the same time it is going around and around would also be going up. Life for the believer indisputably has the same endless cycles of routine as it does for the unbeliever. But it also has direction. In all the routine, your life is headed somewhere, making ground. It has meaning. The seemingly endless cycles of our lives are not those of the beetle in a bucket but of the rising coils of a spiral notebook's binder.