Ecclesiastes 7:13 · World English Bible
Ecclesiastes 7:13 Meaning Consider the Work of God
Consider the work of God, for who can make that straight, which he has made crooked?
What does Ecclesiastes 7:13 mean?
The only suffering a person keeps forever is the kind that requires the world to change shape first. Every person runs a private blueprint of how life is supposed to go, and the distance between it and actual life conditions is where suffering lives.
From the Self-Help reading below.
Ecclesiastes 7:13 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
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The only suffering a person keeps forever is the kind that requires the world to change shape first.
Every person runs a private blueprint of how life is supposed to go, and the distance between it and actual life conditions is where suffering lives. That gap sets the state, the state sets the emotion, and the emotion decides how a man spends the next thirty years.
Three moves close a gap: change the conditions, change the blueprint, make peace with the distance. What God bent on purpose removes the first. A man who requires a crooked thing to come straight before he will feel whole has handed his emotional life to a design he was never asked to approve. Drop the requirement and the energy spent on the impossible comes back for use; keep it and he reaches sixty still arguing with the shape of his own life.
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Live Ecclesiastes 7:13 today
- Pick the one thing in your life you keep replaying and wishing were different, the diagnosis, the family history, the way a person is. Say plainly to yourself that it is not going to change, and feel what gets freed up when you stop pushing on it.
- With someone you keep trying to fix, drop the fixing for one conversation. Be with the person who is actually there rather than the one you keep hoping for.
- When traffic, a delayed flight, or a system outage has you tight, give yourself ten seconds of honest annoyance and then let your body unclench. The road will not move faster because you are angry at it.
What am I waiting for the world to straighten before I will let myself be at peace?
The same truth in other traditions
Stoicism · Epictetus
Some things are in our power and some are not. Peace begins the moment you stop demanding that the second kind obey you.
Tao Te Ching 8
Water does not argue with the shape of the rock. It takes the shape it is given and still arrives.
Buddhism · the second arrow
The first arrow is the hard thing that happened. The second is the insistence that it should not have, and only the second one is ours to put down.
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