By Jim Tune
In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung wrote these penetrating words: “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and the emptiness in their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.”
The late philosopher and author Francis Schaeffer said, “The damnation of this generation is that it doesn’t know that it has any meaning at all.”
Solomon put it this way: “Everything is meaningless. . . . I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:2, 4).
Rabbi Harold Kushner tells a story of a man who came to see him for counseling. After they had talked for a few moments, Kushner said the man described an incident that had left him troubled. Two weeks earlier he had attended the funeral of a man he worked with. He was shaken by the man’s sudden death because they were both the same age””relatively young men with families.
The man elaborated: “They have already replaced him at the office. I hear his wife is moving out of state to live with her parents. Two weeks ago he was working 50 feet away from me, and now it”s as if he never existed. It”s like a rock falling into a pool of water, and then the water is the same as it was before, but the rock isn”t there anymore. I”ve hardly slept at all since then. I can”t stop thinking that it could happen to me and a few days later I will be forgotten as if I had never lived. Shouldn”t a man”s life be more than that?”
Most of us probably harbor similar thoughts. Isn”t there more to life than the same daily spin cycle of work-sleep-work-sleep, followed by death?
Solomon had known true significance at one time in his life. He walked with God when he started out. But the Bible tells us as Solomon grew old he contaminated his life with visions of the world, and he fell away from God.
Solomon is like a European fable about a spider. It descended one day on a single thread from a barn”s lofty rafters, and it alighted near the corner of a window and built its web. The corner of the barn was very busy, and soon the spider had waxed fat and prosperous. One day he was looking at his web and he noticed the strand that reached up to the loft above. He had forgotten its significance, and, thinking it was a stray thread, he snapped it and his whole world fell apart.
We are created for significance. And there”s only one thread that will bring us true joy, the thread that leads us to God.
Author: Christian Standard
Contact us at **@********************ia.com
