Can you remember the first time you rode a merry-go-round? How exciting! The music was fresh and upbeat, you were sitting on a brightly painted plastic horse, there were other people riding beside you, and the scenery kept changing by the second. The merry-go-round opened us to a new world of fun!
How long did it take you to get tired of riding around in circles on your plastic horse? How long did it take to get your fill of the same calliope playing the same tune over and over again? How many times did you have to pass your family members smiling and waving at you before it started getting old? How many minutes did it take before you wanted to get off and back on your own two feet again?
Do you ever get the feeling that life is a merry-go-round? What once was new and exciting, now has become “same old, same old.” Same plastic horse, same music, same neighbors, same scenery.
Today we begin reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:2-11). The writer sounds like he’s tired of riding the merry-go-round of life.
“Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun? One generation passes and another comes…The sun rises and the sun goes down…the wind turns again and again, resuming its rounds…What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun.”
Life seems to go round and round in circles. We keep looking for something new that will get us moving forward again, and it never comes.
“Even if the thing of which we say, ‘See this is new!’ has already existed in the ages that preceded us.”
Do you think young people can identify with the words of Ecclesiastes? Are they looking for something “new under the sun” that will make them happy? Why is this horrible heroin epidemic taking hold in youth culture? Does heroin provide something new and exciting that gives them a temporary escape from the meaninglessness of their lives? At what point do heroin injections, themselves, become just another merry-go-round—yet a worse and potentially fatal one?
Our culture, especially our youth culture, is ripe for “Good News.” We are the Evangelists of today who proclaim loudly and confidently: “there IS something NEW” under the sun. Jesus is new—new every morning! He is the NEW Adam who pulls us off the merry-go-round world that Adam began. He is the NEW Moses who sets us free from whatever bondage is keeping us from being free. He is the NEW Creation who offers us the opportunity to be part of the new kingdom that he established on earth. He is providing a NEW, exciting alternative!
How well are we bearing this “Good News” to the world—especially to our young people? Our first step to being effective Evangelists is getting off our own merry-go-rounds of life and jumping onto the “Jesus train.”
Are we the lights shining in the darkness that God meant us to be? How much darker can a culture become than when its young people who have energy, potential, and talent, start looking to deadly drugs as the best solution life has to offer them? Who is going to tell them that there is a solution to the merry-go-round of life, and that “Solution” loves them and offers them a whole new kind of life and meaning.
Jesus told all of us to pray that God would send laborers to gather the great harvest of our age. Did it ever occur to us that we might be the laborers that we are praying for? Is Satan beating us to the harvest because we are too reluctant to get our shoes muddy?
“Teach us to number our days aright that we may gain wisdom of heart” (Ps 90:12).
