There is a sound that my husband and I loathe to hear at 6:30 p.m. as we are frantically trying to clean up from dinner and get the kids wrangled and ready for bed. It’s the sound of toys crashing to the floor. On a good day, I try to pick up most of the toys before dinner, so the end of day clean up goes a little more smoothly. But little hands have a way of finding bins of toys to dump at just the wrong time, leaving both my husband and me to wonder if the work that we are doing is being done in vain.
The writer of Ecclesiastes describes this sense of work as “like chasing the wind.” Have you ever tried to catch wind? You probably haven’t because you know it is impossible. It’s uncontainable. You can’t see it. Chasing wind is a futile effort. Frankly, the work of the home feels the same way most days. You mop the floor only to have milk spilled all over it at lunch. You wash clothes that immediately get stained again. You clean windows that handprints magically appear on moments after you put the Windex away. You buy groceries only to need to buy them again next week.
Ecclesiastes speaks to these very dilemmas. Although work is very good and part of bearing God’s image, the writer of Ecclesiastes gets that life in a broken world means it all feels like vanity most days. Some call this futility—emphasizing that it may feel meaningless. While we may carry with us the understanding that God created us for good work, we also live on the other side of Genesis 3, where “thorns and thistles” (v. 18) infest our work and we feel overwhelmed by it all. Work can be hard, futile, and painful because we live in a broken world in need of redemption.
Thankfully, God doesn’t leave us to the futility of this fallen world. While it all might feel like vanity, Christ has come and reversed the curse (1 Pet. 1:18). The longing that fills the book of Ecclesiastes find its resolution in Christ, and in the midst of all this seeming futility we know that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58, ESV). In Christ, the sin that stains our work (the sin of others as well as our own sin) is not the final story. In Christ, even when the work feels futile, we know that something better is on the horizon. Christ’s resurrection is the promise that our work will one day be redeemed, and we will one day have eyes to perfectly see the purpose of it all. We have hope that redemption is coming … even when toys come crashing to the floor at bedtime.
Courtney Reissig is a writer living in Little Rock, Arkansas. She is the author of Glory in the Ordinary: Why Your Work in the Home Matters to God. Learn more at CourtneyReissig.com or on Twitter at @courtneyreissig.
