I confess that I am a fan of the game ‘Minecraft’. I started playing it with my youngest daughter and got way too involved. Minecraft gives you a virtual world of land, ocean, mountains, deserts etc. in which you can build anything you want. You can build palaces, skyscrapers, and whole cities if you work at it. And we did work at it, we built lots of amazing things in Minecraft. There was only one problem. After all that work, what we built wasn’t actually real. It was just the product of a sequence of meaningless code. All we did when we toiled in Minecraft is create more lines of code and get very tired eyes as a result. We had a lot of fun together though, and that in retrospect, was the main thing. Solomon claims that our toil in this life can likewise be as meaningless as our toil in Minecraft. We build houses, we make our living spaces nice and we sweat it out in our gardens. But why? What real meaning does it have? I believe it can have great meaning. It all depends on the context. The things that we make only have significance in the context of the relationships we build. A house is a context for relationships. Things have significance only in the context of relationships and the most important relationship is our relationship with God. In a relationship with God our toil takes on a meaning beyond the concrete result. It becomes a relational process in which the outcome is seen as a token of God’s goodness.
Think about how you can prioritise the most important relationships in your life.
Read Ecclesiastes 2:17-26
