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More than That

Ecclesiastes 1:4

Rabbi Harold Kushner tells about a man coming to see him for counseling. The man told Rabbi Kushner this story: "Two weeks ago, for the first time in my life I went to the funeral of a man my own age. I didn't know him well, but we worked together, talked to each other from time to time, had kids about the same age. He died suddenly over the weekend. A bunch of us went to the funeral, each of us thinking, 'It could just as easily have been me.' That was two weeks ago. 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 fifty 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. Rabbi, 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?" Now unfortunately, the answer the Rabbi gave him wasn't a very good one. But isn't that the question so many are asking today? Isn't there more to life than just getting up, going to work, coming home, reading the newspaper, going to bed—and then doing the whole thing over and over again, week after week, until you finally get old and die? Solomon is saying, "If I look at life without God in the picture, it just seems so futile, the course of life just turning over and over. There is no meaning minus Him."

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