One of the most popular screen-games today is ‘Minecraft’. My youngest daughter loves it and I must confess that I have been sucked into it at times myself. It basically gives you a 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 do work at it, we built lots of amazing things in Minecraft. There is only one problem. After all that work, what we have built isn’t actually real. It is just the product of a sequence of code that looks something like this: 0011011100101111001101001110. All that we are actually doing when we toil in Minecraft is create more lines of meaningless code and get very tired eyes as a result. 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
