A good name is better than fine perfume, and the day of one’s death is better than the day of one’s birth. Ecclesiastes 7:1
I’m a morning person. Ninety-five percent of the time, I’m the first one up at home; the first one to the office. Some of this is sheer enthusiasm for the day, and some of it is trying to keep up with the smart ones. If you were in the nongifted group in grade school, too—the armadillos versus the cheetahs—you know what I mean.
Anyway, the first job of the day is making coffee. Over the years, I have gotten adept at this challenging task. I can make a good pot of coffee. Step aside, Starbucks. However, there is something about doing the office coffee that ticks me off. If you’ve come across this, you know exactly what I mean.
Sometimes, when I get to the coffee maker, I discover that the last person out of the office the day before neglected to turn it off. So there, at the bottom of the glass carafe, are six or eight cups of hot coffee reduced to a stinky, rock-hard sediment (shades of high school chemistry class). The coffee room smells like a dirty sock; it’s not a welcome experience that early in the morning.
When you and I were born, God filled us with fresh, hot life and put us on the burner . . . slow heat. From that moment until the day we die, you and I are being reduced to sediment at the bottom of life’s coffee maker. At our funerals, people will pass by our caskets and view these remains. Someone will deliver a eulogy, and our entire lifetimes will be reduced to a three-minute speech.
Is this fair? No. Is this the way it is? Yep.
And we can’t say we weren’t warned. From our first report card to our last perfor- mance review, manifold hours of tireless work are reduced to one single letter grade or one forgettable raise in pay. It doesn’t seem right that all this labor and effort would be summarized so concisely, so briefly, so abruptly. But that’s the way it is anyway.
Although we don’t know what inspired King Solomon to write today’s text, it sounds a lot like he jotted these words down right after attending someone’s funeral—the ultimate summary, the final reduction of a full pot of steaming life to ugly remains. Maybe the experience of listening to a eulogy was necessary for him to take a hard look at those things he had thought were so important.
“What am I doing that’s a complete waste of time?” he might have mused. Or, “What should I do with my time that I’ve been completely avoiding?”
“[Death] is the end of all mankind, and the living should take it to heart. . . . When a face is sad, a heart may be glad,” Solomon wrote (vv. 2–3). It’s almost like he was happy about this experience of mourning. These are powerful thoughts.
Waking up and smelling the sediment has a way of pulling our lives back in line. You and I can’t afford to waste our time today on things that will vanish in the steam. We should never forget this.
Oh, and if you’re the last guy out, please turn off the coffee maker. Thank you.