CHASING THE WIND: GOOD TIMES & SOME LAUGHS

side note

I realize my stuff is lengthy so I decided to bust it up into smaller pieces. I also realize that my way of communicating may be strange and a little unorthodox. My apologies. I have tried being non-strange and very orthodox, only to feel whorish. I truly believe that 1) not every way I communicate is efficacious but 2)it's the real me and 3) so long as I am honest, rather than proud about my rough edges, you get me, rather than some imposter. Maybe you prefer the imposter, but there are minions of them that are much better at it than I am. My best advice, if you even bother reading, is to eat the fish and spit out the bones. What I have to say is placed heavily on my heart.

Ecclesiastes 2:1-3

1I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.” But behold, this also was vanity. 2I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?” 3I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine—my heart still guiding me with wisdom—and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life

I spent an entire day listening to an old man tell me about D Day, slipping across France and Germany and all the incredible things he saw....and how he internalized it. It seemed as if he was reliving it as he told it to me. It was amazing to hear how a rural French family ended up trying to kill him and his men, resulting in their deaths. I heard how he marched across Germany with worn shoes, his only meals coming from preservatives found in basements of homes owned by evacuated Germans. Amazing. Well, as incredible as those memories for him were for me to hear, I think Solomon has much more to say. And I think for all the flash, technological wizardry and mass efficiency we applaud so much of in our day, they are mainly window dressing and we'd would be fools....complete fools, to ignore the words of Solomon, regardless of where you stand with Jesus Christ.

"DID YOU SEE BILL MAHER RIP SARAH PALIN THE OTHER NIGHT?"

It's helpful to understand the meanings of these two words. Laughter, in this text, means a laughter associated with mocking, scorn and derision....humor at the expense of someone else. Bill Maher immediately comes to mind. His comedy is about 98% derision and mockery of other people. He has a following who enjoy it too. What's absurd about this sort of comedy is that it is funny to Bill and his audience but its like a series of upper-cuts and jabs to the rib cage, for those the material is directed. And it's intentional. It's verbal violence, meant to destroy and take down. I think it comes from frustration in life and the need to direct a lot of anger and frustration out on something or someone.

Many times, getting together with friends could mean this sort of 'good times'. There is a pleasure in verbally tearing apart people you don't care for, people who messed up royally, or just are difficult to get along with. It feels good to get those jabs in. But it doesn't last. It comes from indignance and anger and although it is expressed as laughter, its like kerosene to the indignance and anger, causing it to flare even more. It may feel like a release at the time, but if we're honest, we never really feel all that wonderful for more than a few minutes. We'll try to neurotically remember every word we said or a friend said....how their imitations were just so....all as an effort to do nothing more than to catapult us back in time so we might feel a little of the release we felt at that moment. But it never quite works out that way.

It turns out to be a pointless exercise to help us numb the pain of a pointless existence. But the type of humor or laughter points to something deeper in Solomon's text. Our job, relationships at home, finances, legal issues or whatever bear down on us through the week and we look forward to some good times this weekend. The frustration of life is brought with us to the bar, living room or backyard deck and our natural inclination is to take it out on someone or something else, therapeutically, of course. All as a means of relaxing, recharging the batteries. Since it's all jokes and laughter, what harm is there in it, and it seems to bring a little joy back, even for a moment. "What does pleasure accomplish?" Some of Solomon's friends would probably not understand what he was talking about. They were there too. It seemed like awesome times to them. But Solomon is just being honest. In the scheme of everything, it turns out to be pointless. Monday comes and reality, we find, never really left us. And it seems as if our despair has grown even more, as we face another week of insanity or unpredictable events. So, he turns to getting drunk to embrace all the folly. He just wanted to see if he did everything he could to 'lighten up' would he be able to find any point to it all or anything worthwhile, with the limited amount of air we get to take in before decaying in the ground. All meaningless.

I understand this all too well. My job involves lots of deadlines and pressure since it's connected to my client's cash flow. It's serious when its my cash flow. It's life or death when it's theirs. It's just how I have dealt with it since I began doing what I do over 20 years ago. Don't get me wrong. I do enjoy what I do and am very thankful for it. But many times I feel the need to find some outlet or deflate pressure or find just a little escape. And I realize lots of people have it much worse than I do. We can dress up work and career to make it look and sound very sexy, but in the end, it is toil. Toil in a fallen existence that's been going on for a long time. And we are just a tiny slice in the flow of history. Work is good. Toil is not the same thing as work. Yet seems to always be confused with work because they seem to be seen together so often.

SOMETHING'S MISSING

But this sort of pleasure isn't simply horse laughing jokes about somebody else over a brewsky. When I get together with friends, sometimes I try to reminisce about old times. Sometimes with a little hint of desperation. There is a desperation there to find a happy place in the absence of being able to travel in time to the same 15 minutes, over and over again. But even if I could, there's a necessary reality of diminishing returns. I saw a movie a couple of weeks ago that made me laugh so hard I felt I had a hangover the entire next day. I got to watch it again later on, hardly laughed at all. What a let down. It's like everything has a shelf life. According to Solomon, everything does and is going the same way, back to the dust.

So, if that is the case, what is it that makes us seek these good times out, relive them, make new ones, almost worship them? Jump ahead to chapter 3 verse 10-11:

"I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

In other words, the movie that changed your life, the song or CD that made you weep, the awestruck feeling you got at the Vegas show or the book you read that seemed to give incredible perspective....these things are clues. We consider them nuggets of finality....islands of joy in a sea of toil and worry. But they are only clues, because they never last in intensity for us. Diminishing returns of good things. The ability to recognize them is a clue, in that we have the concept of eternity furnished in our hearts. Sartre said the minute we can get rid of the concept of our eternity, life is meaningless. He's right. But we can't. If we could, we would all be robots. We're not and the fact life is a series of diversions and bittersweet endeavors for happiness testifies to this. The object we recognize....the beauty in a song, painting, date.....the laughter in a movie or book....that feeling or stab of joy as C.S. Lewis would call it, is testimony of the eternity in our hearts and testimony to God who put it there as well as all the things in this world we get to enjoy, even with diminishing returns. We just want that same feeling again and we can't seem to duplicate it. We can experience it again in something completely different. But we can never duplicate it like it was when we first experienced it.

Have you ever stepped out in the back yard late at night, all alone, and just looked at the sky and pondered just about everything? The eternity set in your heart will not allow mechanical duplication of those little nuggets of joy. The reason why, is that you were made for more than little happenings or events. But if you try to turn eternity inside out and try sucking out the marrow of a late night joint, night out at Chochskie's with your buds or get a pirated copy of the movie that changed your life but can't wait for it to come out on cable....it's hollow and unfulfilling because those things were to point to the hunger and the hunger to be properly placed where it can be satisfied, which is God. He's spoken verbally, propositionally and truly, even if not exhaustively in Scripture. Solomon made Elvis seem like Bobby Fisher so he could tell you and me what it all means.....chasing the wind, unless we find ourselves satisfied in the One who placed eternity on our hearts. Lastly, He revealed His incredible love for us through the giving of His only Son. Whatever power, force, unbending legal requirements the Old Testament seems to reveal, the love behind it all was perfectly expressed in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the inflection point between humanity and deity. Both are infused perfectly in Him. Everything I know about God, I know only through Jesus Christ. There is nothing I know about God outside of Jesus Christ. And life has meaning. It's not a nervous series of ingenious ways of trying to relive that stab of joy. No love is greater than the love revealed in His work on the cross and His work in my life.