I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my work,
and this was the reward for all my labor.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:10-11)
"Where is the public library?" you may ask a local who is passing by. "Oh, it is straight ahead, hundred meters away," he might say.
And so you walk on, and after 30 minutes and way past that "hundred meters," you realize that the person has given you wrong directions. Then you decide to ask another for what are, hopefully, the right directions. This time, the person whom you ask tells you to go back the way you came from for a hundred meters. "How can this be? I just came from there," you inform her. However, she insists that she is right and that you should trust her. So you retreat a hundred meters and you are back to where you had started, and not any closer to your destination.
You see, none of those whom you had asked actually knew for sure where your destination is. However, in order to "save face," they pretend that they do (and sometimes do a very good job at it!). As they did not want to appear ignorant, they had to convincingly point you towards a certain direction—oftentimes, the wrong one.
Trying to get to your destination on one of these crowded streets is in a lot of ways like how we are trying to live our lives. For most of us, our destination is the place where we will find the answers to our existential questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?
Then there are those who have taken the route of pleasure by embracing a certain lifestyle that would gratify one in all kinds of sensuous desires. Yet Solomon, the king who possessed so much wealth and denied himself nothing he desired, found only futility in his years of indulgence. He records this poignantly in Ecclesiastes 2:10, 11:
Clearly the route of unbridled pleasure is not the course that will lead us to where our soul seeks to go.
Then there is the relativist's way of taking whichever road one wishes, believing they all will lead home. However, though the roads may seem to head in the same direction, we soon we will realize that they make drastic turns at crucial points that take fellow travelers on other paths farther and farther away from each other. Not all roads lead to home, it seems.
C.S. Lewis rightly observes that this world will offer us all sorts of things or ways that promise to take us to our soul's destination, but they never quite keep to their word.(1) After the fleeting moment of enchantment leaves us, we are back to our starting point.
Unlike most Eastern gurus who claim that they have found the way and that they could show their followers the way, Jesus self-assuredly declares that he is the way, and that only through him will we find true rest at our soul's rightful home.
Which way are you taking today to get you home? Who are you asking for your directions to where you are going? As C.S. Lewis aptly concludes in Mere Christianity, "[L]ook for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in." I would recommend that you take the route of Christ.
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