Ecclesiastes 7 - Postscript on Sorrow
 14 When times are good, be happy;
      but when times are bad, consider:
      God has made the one
      as well as the other.
      Therefore, a man cannot discover
      anything about his future.
To me, this means that times change, and that God has your path laid out for you. But are we completely out of control? No, for death is not our fate, but our destiny. We go through the times that God has laid out, but we choose how to respond to them. God has not laid out our actions. On the other hand, because we don’t know what the times hold for us, looking at how things are now will is not indication that times won’t change… they will. How things are now is just how they are now. So let’s go back a verse…
 13 Consider what God has done:
      Who can straighten
      what he has made crooked?
Because times go from good to bad to good to bad, we cannot see around the bend. No one’s life is a straight path of good or a straight path of bad, and as hard as we try we cannot straighten out what God has made crooked. But, our reactions can be righteous throughout the entire journey… that is a choice we have, so it would seem that while our circumstances form a wide and crooked path, within it is a straight and narrow one. I’d call this a paradox, but somehow it’s what God has done, and it’s our call travel through both. Therefore…
 15 In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these:
      a righteous man perishing in his righteousness,
      and a wicked man living long in his wickedness.
Meaningless? Yeah, so don’t live for this life, but use this life to live for the next. In the meantime, as you follow the straight and narrow path of righteousness down the wide and crooked path of your circumstances, you will see others doing the same, and will unavoidably see the righteous fall on bad times and the wicked fall on good. It’s how life is.
To be continued…