Chasing the Wind

David's son, the king in Jerusalem, sat with a pen in his hand and a long life behind him. He called himself the Teacher. (Many people think he was Solomon.) He had tried everything, and now he was writing down what he found.

The first thing he wrote was a sigh.

"Breath!" he wrote. "A puff of breath! Everything is a breath, here and then gone."

He looked at the world and saw it going in circles. The sun comes up, hurries across the sky, sets, and rushes round to come up again. The wind blows south, swings north, and ends up back where it started. (The wind has been going in circles since the world began and still hasn't got anywhere.) Every river runs into the sea, and the sea is never full.

"There is nothing new under the sun," said the Teacher.

So he looked for something that would last. He built houses. He planted vineyards and orchards of every kind of fruit tree, and he dug pools to water them. (A man who needs a pool to water his trees has a lot of trees.) He piled up silver and gold and kept singers to sing whenever he liked. He feasted, laughed, and worked hard all day long. Whatever his eyes wanted, he took.

Then he looked at it all. "Chasing the wind," he said. "All of it." You can feel the wind push the grass flat, but close your fist around it, open it again, and your fist is empty.

Something harder bothered him too. A wise man dies, and a fool dies, and soon nobody remembers either one. Everyone dies, even kings. The body goes back to the dust, and the breath goes back to God, who gave it. One day the Teacher would die, and someone else would walk in his gardens.

But he also saw that God has a time for everything, and he wrote it like a song:

A time to be born, and a time to die.
A time to plant, and a time to pull up.
A time to cry, and a time to laugh.
A time to be sad, and a time to dance.

"God makes everything beautiful in its time," he wrote. "He has set forever in people's hearts." That was why nothing under the sun could fill them.

At the end of his book he left his last advice. "Remember the God who made you while you are young. Respect God and keep his commands. That is what every person is for."

Still, the Teacher could see only as far as the sun went. He knew forever was in his heart, but not who would fill it, and at last his own breath went back to God like everyone else's.

Kings came and went in Jerusalem. The sun rose and set, and the wind kept circling.

Then another son of David walked those same streets. "I have come so you can have life, and have it to the full," he told the crowds, and he promised a life with God that would never blow away like breath. He was killed, and his body was laid in a tomb cut out of rock. But on the third day the tomb was empty, and he was alive, and he will never die again.

At last there was something new under the sun. Jesus was big enough to fill the forever God had set in every heart.