Meaningless, Meaningless

"Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?

I meet an interesting old man last week. He was facing the end of his days here on earth. His lungs were diseased and scarred beyond repair - his heart was in even worse shape. He lacked the strength to even lift his head off the pillow. The doctors had done all they could do.
It wasn't his physical condition that made him so unusual, nor the fact that he only had a few days left to live. In my line of work I meet people like that every day. It was his dying wish that caught my attention.

He told me that all he really wanted was what he called a "temporary patch job". He only needed enough strength to make one last trip to the Casinos in Tunica Mississippi. That was it - that was his dying wish! He had convinced himself that all of the answers to all of his problems could somehow magically be fixed by one lucky tug on a slot machine handle.

His words really caught me off guard. How could anyone be so foolish? How could anyone really think that money was the answer for anything? It sounded so absurd coming from the lips of a dying man.

God has a subtle way of using the people around me to sometimes remind me of my own faults and my own insanity. It occurred to me that in reality the only difference between this poor misguided man and the rest of us, is the time he had left to live. We all waste our lives working hard and chasing after the things that are really meaningless. We neglect and misuse the truly important things in life because we are too busy working for the useless stuff.