Reflections with Andy - Ecclesiastes 3:9–15 – The Gift of the Present Moment

We feel so pulled and pushed by everything. May we have the grace to live fully in this present moment

In this Wednesday reflection on Ecclesiastes 3:9–15, one phrase anchors everything: God has put a sense of past and future into their minds. We are wired to look backward and forward simultaneously — to remember, to plan, to worry, to dream — and that tension so often pulls us out of the only moment we actually inhabit: now. The Teacher keeps returning to the same simple refrain throughout his searching: eat, drink, take pleasure in your toil — it is God’s gift. The present moment is the gift. Social media has made this harder than it’s ever been, training us toward constant comparison and doom scrolling and dissatisfaction with wherever we are. But God meets us here, now, in the ordinary. More than half the church calendar is spent in Ordinary Time — not Advent or Easter, just regular days — because most of life is ordinary, and ordinary time is holy too. The call today is simple: don’t let the past or the future steal the gift of the present. Live fully in this moment, because this is where Jesus meets us.

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Good morning! Great to be with you on this Wednesday as we continue through Ecclesiastes. Yesterday we talked about the seasons of life — how everything has its time, and how God walks with us through all of it. Today we’re staying in chapter 3, reading verses 9 through 15:

“What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in their toil. I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.”

I want to linger on one phrase: he has put a sense of past and future into their minds. That’s such a perceptive observation. Don’t we feel that? I just turned 50, and I’ve noticed what everybody warned me about — the older you get, the better you used to be. You find yourself telling the old stories more, enjoying the memories, wanting to understand where you came from. We have a genuine sense of the past wired into us. And at the same time, we’re always looking ahead — planning, dreaming, anxious about what’s coming. The future pulls at us just as much as the past does.

And so we end up living in this tension between the two — sometimes bound by what happened, sometimes paralyzed by what might happen — and we miss the moment we’re actually in.

I think that’s part of why the Teacher keeps returning to the same refrain throughout Ecclesiastes, even in the midst of all his searching: there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live. It is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in their toil. He keeps coming back to the present. Not the legacy, not the accumulation, not the grand achievement — just the gift of being alive and finding meaning in the work right in front of you, today.

And I think we’ve largely lost that. I say this with full awareness of the irony — many of you are watching this on social media — but social media has trained us to be deeply dissatisfied with the present moment. We scroll through what everyone else is doing, what they have, where they went, how their life looks compared to ours. And then there’s what they call doom scrolling — just scrolling and scrolling at night, not even looking for anything specific, just absorbing anxiety. The more you scroll, the more unsettled you get. We’ve been slowly trained out of the ability to just be here, now, and find God in it.

But here’s what the Teacher is pointing toward, and what I believe with everything in me: God meets us in the present moment. Not in the past we can’t change or the future we can’t control — here, now, in this exact moment. You have a chance today. Right now. To open Scripture and listen for God’s voice. To pray. To love somebody. To be the hands and feet of Jesus in whatever ordinary situation you find yourself in. To offer forgiveness or ask for it. To start over.

This is actually what the church calendar is getting at with what’s called Ordinary Time. If you observe the church year — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost — after Pentecost you enter a long stretch that some traditions call Ordinary Time, or Kingdom Tide, or just the Sundays after Pentecost. It takes up over half the church year. More than half. And I’ve always loved that, because isn’t that exactly what life is? Mostly ordinary time. Regular, routine, run-of-the-mill days that don’t feel particularly spiritual or significant. And the church says: this too is holy. This too is where God is at work.

So today — don’t neglect the gift of the day you’ve been given. We have the pull of the past and the push of the future, and both of them are real. But let’s not let them crowd out the one thing we actually have: this moment, this day, this chance to live faithfully and love well.

Live fully today. Tomorrow we’ll pick up with chapter 3, verse 16. Have a great day!