FINDING GLORY IN FUTILITY

Life can feel like a fight for glory in futility

I tossed the plastic airplane in the basket again and sighed. Three little hurricanes would inevitably tear through the living room and leave a trail of destruction in their wake. It was an exercise in futility. Mess, tidy, repeat—just like the groceries and laundry and workday. 

Most days brim with ordinary things. Life is made up of simple motions that no one sees or remembers. We roll stones up a hill just for them to tumble back down, seeking glory in futility.

But we want more. Something in us rages against the futility that suffuses life, and so we pour ourselves into relationships and children and career and service, hoping that one day, our lives will stand for something. We can’t outrun our desire to matter. We are meaning-seeking, glory-thirsting creatures. 

Glory is a funny word for us. It doesn’t make it into most modern conversation, but it’s the idea of honor, majesty and significance. It captures what it is for us to matter. In the Old Testament, the word for “glory” is kabod, which literally means “heavy” or “weight”.^[1]The word kabod is used for figuratively and literally in Scripture. In 1 Samuel 4, it’s used literally for physical weight. When Samuel heard that the Philistines had captured the ark from the … Continue reading Which is what we crave. 

We crave glory in futility

We want to matter but experience teaches that even our best things are vulnerable to time and chance and circumstance^[2]Ecc 9:12. Most of the time, we work for things that don’t ultimately last or satisfy ^[3]Ecc 1:2-11. Success. Smaller numbers on the scale. Happy families. But everything eventually gets swept away. Memories fade, legacies die.  We are a breath that is desperate to last;^[4]Ps 39:5, 11 dust that contemplates its own weight. 

It’s a curse. Romans says that “the creation was subjected to futility” and scholars suggest that Paul had Ecclesiastes in mind when he wrote this verse^[5]Kidner at p 95, noting that the “unhappy business” of “vanity and a striving after wind” is seen in [Ecclesiastes] as what “God has given to the sons of men to be busy with” (Ecc 1:13). Ecclesiastes wrestles with the point of existence–the suspicion that life, looked at unflinchingly, is ultimately just an empty breath and a passing vapour. Hebel. Futile.^[6]Derek Kidner, The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes: Intervarsity Press (1985) p 90, fn 3 

We can’t survive long under that shadow, so we chase and create and build and live. But sometimes, the wariness that we’re really running after wind^[7]Ecc 2:17 haunts us. It drifts by a graveside or murmurs in sleepless nights. It grumbles when we get the things we crave and still feel empty, witnessing that nothing we do is immune from the wind. Nothing we do gives us the kind of weight we want.

God transforms our futility with his glory

Paul says that the rescue from our futility is “the freedom of the glory of the children of God”^[8]Rom 8:20-21. It sounds great, but life can feel like anything but glorious freedom. We don’t accomplish most of the things we aspire to achieve. We don’t remember most details of our days and that desire for significance can feel more like a prison than freedom. 

But there’s a secret: After recognizing our experience of futility, Paul writes that we already have all the glory we could ever want in Jesus, apart from anything we do today or tomorrow or the next.^[9]Rom 8:30 Our lives inhabit a reality we can’t see, where we have weight, substance, and importance-–the opposite of wind. 

We measure our significance in what’s remembered, but God remembers it all. He numbers hairs we don’t count and bottles tears we ignore. He writes each day in his book. Nothing is lost in a God who is always I Am. He sees; He remembers; He indwells.

Every moment has weight. The laundry and the tidying and the job we didn’t plan. Dirty socks and snotty noses. In him, our experience of insignificance is as important as the moments we think define our lives. 

This moment is thick with his presence and his purpose.

God whispers in the breeze in hope: that we would feel our need for weight; that we would rail against life as a breath; that chasing the wind would push us into the arms of the breath of life. 

We have more weight than we could ever create.