There are so many ways to get in trouble! The Proverbs are a great collection of sayings that remind us that wisdom and foolishness lead to clearly different outcomes! This reading reminds us that we live wisely when we have quick hands and a slow tongue. I don’t know how many times I have spoken too quickly. The fallout is almost always bad!

Helpless beings in a meaningless world: this is Solomon’s appraisal of the human race. Again and again throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, these are adjectives he uses to describe us, slaves and kings alike. We stumble about, blind, naked and without understanding. With all our art we try to conjure a meaning behind our lives.

There is such a thing as disaster. The structure of things collapses, suddenly and without warning. The market crashes and your forty years’ security is erased. A dark spot appears on a routine x-ray. The child is miscarried. The father is killed by the roadside bomb, far away. There is such a thing as disaster, and grief that will not be comforted.

We live in a culture that worships good advertising, where the quality of anything matters less than how it is presented to its consumers. When good marketing becomes the highest virtue, everything becomes simply a product to be sold, including our own identities. You can be good and wise and virtuous but if you can’t play the game, can’t sell yourself, you will be outshouted and outshone by those who can.

In his novel Perelandra, C.S. Lewis reimagines Adam and Eve’s temptation playing out on an alien world. It is a world in which the first man and woman live on floating islands that drift, uncontrolled, in a planet-wide sea. Instead of a tree from which they must not eat, God has forbidden them to sleep for the night on the few pieces of fixed, terrestrial land.

Nobody knows the true story of their life. We know the things we do and say, the actions that we choose to take while we are alive. But no one knows what effect these things have beyond the moment in which they are done. Decisions meant to be life-changing come to nothing, while thoughtless actions reverberate down through the decades.

“But you promised!” My daughter wailed those accusing words and stomped from the room. My heart sank. She was right. I had promised, and to her it looked like the fulfillment of that promise would never happen. It wasn’t until she had grown and matured that she realized I had kept my promise to her that day. It just took a while for her to see how.