September '26
“It’s terrifying to find out this late in life what you should have done.”
So says Richard Jenkins’ character Don Hollar in the 2016 film, The Hollars, as he bemoans his failing company and his wife’s terminal illness and how we spent his time.
Don is wrestling with hindsight. The clichè says that it’s 20/20. We have all experienced the frustration of handling a situation poorly because we lacked information that we only gained through the experience of handling it poorly.
Avoiding that pain or embarrassment would have required your 15 year old self to have the wisdom of a seasoned sage. Maybe you lament the stocks you didn’t invest in, the person you didn’t ask out, the apprenticeship you didn’t start, the thing on the market place you should have bought, the piece of junk you now need that you took to the dump last week, the time you didn’t spend with your kids, the answer you got wrong because you didn’t read the question carefully. Lord Huron’s smash hit runs along the same lines:
“Take me back to the night we met
And then I can tell myself
What the hell I'm supposed to do
And then I can tell myself
Not to ride along with you”
If only I knew better.
Is this an unavoidable problem we’re doomed to repeat? 33 year old Phil wouldn’t make the mistakes of 23 year old Phil, but 33 year old Phil has his own problems to deal with. Solomon has some thoughts for us:
Some frustration is unavoidable.
He writes: “Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked” (Eccl 7:13). Here Solomon unpacks one key aspect of his hevel (mist) image: you cannot make the world do what you want it to do. Even when armed with the best wisdom and godliness, life under the sun includes frustration and being blindsided. To escape that we need a new world, one which God himself has made straight.
The answer does not lie in hitting the books.
After enough situations of not having enough knowledge, we might think, “OK, let’s preempt this thing.” So you hit the books. You have lots of conversations with grey heads. You audit a bunch of courses. You watch a stack of docos. Solomon concedes there is something to this: “Wisdom is good” (7:11). But it has its limits. We can arm ourselves with information only to find that instead of making us more streetwise it makes us more sad (1:18). We can also spend so much time doing it that it exhausts us and there’s still more important things we don’t know (12:12) and that we’ve been kept from important things like doing good, being happy, eating, drinking, and taking pleasure in our work (3:12-13).
Trust the wisdom of God.
If following every possible lead is not doable, where does this leave us? All we can do is entrust ourselves to our wise (12:11) and sovereign (3:14) God who makes everything beautiful in its time (3:11), including this old world and all its drama. You will experience regret, shame, frustration, remorse, and discomfort in this life. There is a time for mourning, for weeping, for breaking down, for losing. But there is also a time to heal, to dance, to laugh, to love, and to embrace (3:1-8).
He is leading us through the valley of the shadow of death into the house of the Lord forever.
In all of this, He does speak and we can know His ways, directly from His mouth.
Pay attention to His wisdom, which is words of truth and words of delight.
In them you will find what you need to know to make you complete, equipped for every good work, and wise unto salvation. You don’t have to know everything. Just listen to the one who does.
- Pastor Phil