Just Chasing The Wind… Hello Hump Day readers. I hope your July 4th festivities were filled with a wonderful time and a patriotic nod to this great country we live in. Despite all its warts and pimples, we are blessed beyond measure to live in a country that has “liberty, justice and freedom” for all.

Up here in northern New Mexico we are July-warm and windy—very windy! It’s not unusual as the warm winds off the Pacific and the Gulf of California sweep right at us. The sailboats on the lake almost look like speedboats and it takes some handling to tack in high winds. Picnics require some interesting items to hold down napkins, plates, etc. Yet, the wind is also keeping the heat at bay so you learn to take the good with the bad. One of our campers, a retired pastor, told me “I ran after everything that flew off the picnic table, it was like Solomon’s words ‘chasing the wind’ but I did harness in the bratwurst and pickles!”

His story had me looking up Solomon’s words from Ecclesiastes 1:17: “I said to myself, ‘Look, I am wiser than any of the kings who ruled in Jerusalem before me. I have greater wisdom and knowledge than any of them.’ So I set out to learn everything from wisdom to madness and folly. But I learned firsthand that pursuing all this is like chasing the wind.” I continued more of his verses and wise old Solomon was spot-on!

How often do we chase the wind and come up ‘empty-handed’? In this society, we have so many options that it takes wisdom in what we choose and sometimes our choices disappoint us. Like the brilliant physicist, Dr. J.R. Oppenheimer, who was the head of the Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the atomic bomb. He also directed the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His mounting accomplishments dazzled the scientific world, yet, shortly before he died, he said “What accomplishments? They leave on the tongue only the taste of ashes, a chasing in the wind.”

Solomon’s question was “am I pursuing knowledge without God? The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief.” He was right, without God our knowledge is not complete. Think of it this way, “If intellectualism alone were the key to purpose and fulfillment, then our college campuses would be bastions of peace and purpose…yet we find the most bizarre, aberrant ideas available. This is the emptiness of academic pursuit without God.” (Greg Laurie)

The talents God has given each of us are to be not only beneficial to our lives and the lives of others, but they are also for the Kingdom of God. When we “pursue chasing in the wind without the wisdom of God” the knowledge we strive for tends to be, well—empty. And that emptiness, like it did for Oppenheim, is not satisfaction for body, soul or mind.

Bob Dylan explains his song, Blowin’ In The Wind, saying “There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show…too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some…but the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down…and then it flies away. I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong…they’re just blowing in the wind.”

I’m not sure his theory is a totally good one, but he does have a point when he says ‘we see wrong and turn away’. The ‘paper’ does come down to us—we’ve had the paper from the Scriptures for centuries, but we have to pick it up and read it or it blows away in the wind.

We can learn a lot from Solomon who chased just about everything he could to have a meaningful life. It was when he turned to God’s wisdom, he found his answers. So, in closing, think about this: No matter what your occupation is, God’s wisdom is a part of it because the occupation you have is God’s gift to you. If you are not pursuing God’s wisdom, all your efforts are truly a “chasing in the wind”—or could we say, “blowing in the wind?” Let’s face it, usually when the wind takes something up into the air, we don’t get it back. That’s not where God wants us to be, AMEN.