What is the meaning of life? YOLO.

M. Todd Hall

The author and his daughter YOLOing, ca. 2014

¹³ As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; ¹⁴for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust. ¹⁵As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; ¹⁶the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. ¹⁷But from everlasting to everlasting the LORD’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children —¹⁸with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts.

Psalm 103:13–18

View excerpts from Keith's Ecclesiastes video course

What is the meaning of life? More to the point: of our labor in life—whatever it may be—what will actually last? What of all that we have done or will do in life really means anything at all, and how can we recognize it? I think that, while this question has a long (and detailed) history, it is perhaps more acute today than ever before. This is the crisis of our age, as the philosophical foundations undergirding late modernity collapse under their own weight. Though it doesn’t seem like it on the surface, if one digs very deeply at all one finds that the age in which we live is one full of angst at the stubborn emptiness that remains no matter how hard we try to fill it with consumerist “stuff.” Deep down, we know there is nothing more meaningless than accumulating great wealth and its accoutrements. So what do we do? How do we climb off the hamster wheel and actually make some progress? Happily, God is not oblivious to our need for meaning.

Several years ago , during a semester, chapel at Austin Grad focused on the megilloth—the five scrolls read throughout the year during Jewish festivals. These include Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Song of Songs, and Esther. While I have been in classes for most of those books, I don’t recall having heard homilies from them before. This led to an opportunity for reflection that has remained with me even to this day. And I think that, given the state of the world around us, the message of one of those scrolls in particular—Ecclesiastes—speaks a word that we (and the folks living all around us) need to hear: YOLO. For those of you who don’t have teenaged kids: YOLO is an acronym for “You only live once.” This is a perfect summation of Ecclesiastes. When I told my daughter the title of my chapel homily that semester (the same as this blog post), she rolled her eyes and said “nobody’s saying that anymore, dad.” Which is also a perfect illustration of Ecclesiastes.

I had a powerful illustration of Ecclesiastes in my own life in 2016 that I’ll never forget. On May 12^th of 2016, I graduated from Texas State University with a PhD in Education. This was the culmination of many long years of study and work, and it was a great celebration to be a part of. Speakers at the commencement ceremony congratulated us on our achievements, and we were hooded with our doctoral hoods in front of a large audience of people, projected on the big screen in the basketball arena. We were lauded for our hard work, for our academic excellence, for reaching the pinnacle of academic attainment. It was all very heady stuff.

So, for about an hour on that Thursday, I reveled in the attention and accolades. I may have even indulged myself toward believing them, at least for a little while. But God, in his great mercy and wisdom, would not let me stay long at such altitudes—“he remembers we are dust.”

After graduation, I went to a quick lunch. And after lunch, I went straight to the funeral for a beloved older gentleman in my home congregation who had died after a long struggle with various problems after a car accident. He was a wonderful man, an “original cowboy” who had punched cattle in Kyle for decades. He was incredibly friendly, serving for years after retirement as a greeter and information attendant at our local hospital. He was a genuinely funny person whose dry wit and impish smile absolutely compelled happiness in folks around him. He was a devout and devoted churchman, living in joyous communion with all of us. He was, in short, someone I’d like to be when I grow up.

As I sat in his funeral listening to his eulogy and preparing to sing, I reflected in gratitude on the one final gift he left for me. We celebrated his life and mourned him gone. We heard the joy he had brought to so many people and the love he’d shown through his devoted life to God’s people. In doing so, we placed into its proper context the celebration I’d been through earlier in the day. Qohelet (the writer of Ecclesiastes) tapped me on the shoulder: “That’s pretty cool. But don’t let it go to your head.”

Ecclesiastes has, I think, an important message for a world such as ours, a world so wrapped up with busy-ness and progress and achievement and technological distractions that we have to put padding on light poles and caution tape around manholes to keep cell-phone lookers from walking into them. Qohelet, who has “been there, done that” in almost any situation we can think of, says “fleeting.” All of those things that we place such a high value on—success, achievement, promotion, progress, writing a brilliant blog post—all of them are, in the end, ashes and dust, as are we. In a sense, this is the message of the Bible itself.

So what do we do to find something meaningful to do in life? For Qohelet, meaning is found in life itself. “Life is short and then you die and are utterly forgotten, and everything you ever thought mattered doesn’t. So enjoy it!” I may be overstating the case, a little, but not a whole lot. The message of Ecclesiastes is to find joy in the life you have, to see the beauty of what it is to be you, in your time, in your place, and to find satisfaction therein rather than spending a life “chasing after the wind.” And this is powerfully helpful advice, something that is in many ways antithetical to the very heart of American culture, with its dream of upward mobility. Many a person has lived a miserable life in refusing to find happiness where they are. I’m not encouraging sloth, of course, but there is a word here in Ecclesiastes that Americans need to hear. Life’s not that bad where we are.

I think, though, that we can also move beyond this message. In psalm 103 (quoted above), we are assured that our God’s love is “from everlasting to everlasting” with those who fear him. When we partner with God in his work in the world, we can be assured that our work in this life will last. Jesus tells his disciples that “the Kingdom of God”—that is, God’s active presence and work in the world—"is among you.” This means that eternal life isn’t something that we, as Christians, have after we die. Rather, it includes the life we are living now in Christ’s kingdom. The character that we develop and the acts that we do that grow from our experience in and connection with that Kingdom will last into eternity, even through the purging fire of judgment (cf. 1 Cor 3:12–15).

Ultimately, then, the message that the church in America desperately needs to hear and proclaim is thoroughly counter-cultural. We should drop out of the harried life and question the dominant narrative of the “good life” in American culture. Dallas Willard’s work Knowing Christ Today can be very helpful here. Willard offers a few questions that help bring to light a culture’s worldview. Two of these include “What is the good life?” and “who is a good person?” Willard points out that, in our culture, the picture of the good life usually has something to do with temporal wealth and sensual enjoyment. The problem, Willard points out, is that this rarely fits with the picture of the “good person.” Willard illustrates this mismatch by pointing to obituaries: rarely, if ever, Willard says, will readers see “She had a great figure, fine teeth and hair,” or “He ate, drank, and was merry” (p. 48). Rather, there is something inside of us, Willard suggests, that long(s) “to be good, to be worthy, and not just to be.”

Qohelet would tell us that striving after the good life, as currently conceived in American popular culture, is a “striving after the wind.” But striving for the good life, which finds satisfaction, even joy, in striving to be a good person, is a life that will last into eternity.

In the cemetery in San Marcos, there is a headstone that carries the epitaph for a life lived in this way. It reads, in part

In Hays County, Texas; March 28, 1884.

As husband, father, friend, and neighbor he was above reproach. For many

years a professed disciple of Christ, his daily life gave lucid proof that he was sincerely one—In church relation, a Methodist, but in spirit he was a catholic Christian, whose sympathies warmly embraced the whole Israel of God—All communions mourn him gone, and on all of them may his mantle fall.

May we all be so blessed to live such a life.

Keith Stanglin's latest video course is a walk through Ecclesiastes, and will be available soon! Check out the excerpts for his course on our YouTube channel!

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