There is a moment most people have, usually around a dinner table, when they look at the people they love and time seems to stand still. You think ahead to the years when some of these people will not be at the table, and the years when you will not be at the table. The dinner is fine. The food is fine. Nothing is wrong. But the moment is suddenly very large, because you can see that it is passing.
You know it about your kids. You know it about your parents. You know it about the friend a mile away who laughs the way she did when you were both seventeen. You know it about your own body, which used to do things it cannot do anymore. Then somebody asks for the salt, and the conversation resumes, and you resume with it, and no one at the table knows you were briefly somewhere else.
Something from those moments stays. You find yourself watching your people with a tenderness slightly out of proportion to the evening, laughing at the joke and storing the laugh at the same time. Some people have these moments rarely. Some have them weekly. You leave each one knowing that all of this is passing and that it is precious, and you enjoy the people at the table more for knowing it. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes has a name for what breaks through in those moments.
“He has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11
The verse makes two claims that sit uneasily together. The first is that God has put something in you that ordinary things will not fill, even the very good ordinary things, and you know this without being told. The second is that you cannot get there. You can see what is in front of you, and sometimes behind you, but never the whole of what God is doing from beginning to end. The hunger is real, and it was put there on purpose.
The person most surprised by this is often the one who did everything right. He has done what the plan said. The house is the house they wanted. The career survived every downturn. The kids came out kind. On paper there is nothing left to want, and the wanting has not stopped. He stands at the kitchen window some evenings with a feeling he would be embarrassed to name. He checked every box, and the ache is still there. Nothing went wrong. He is finding out, at fifty, that he was made for more than any list of goals could hold.
You can do one of three things with the verse. You can deny the first half: the hunger is a glitch, nothing means anything. That is honest as far as it goes, and it does not match what happens to most people at a table on a Tuesday. You can deny the second half: you have it figured out, and every question has an answer you can carry around. That is the religious version of the same move. Or you can let the verse stand. The hunger stays. The limit stays. You do not get to resolve them. You get to live with both, and the living is the good part.
Nobody chooses once. The first denial is there every time the phone is easier than the feeling. The second is there every time a neat answer is easier than not knowing. The third has to be chosen again every day. Ecclesiastes reads that way too: the Preacher keeps coming back to the same questions, and that is part of why he can be trusted.
Five times in his book the Preacher stops describing and tells you what to do. Eat your bread. Drink your wine. Do good while you live. Rejoice in the work you were given. The instruction is to receive what is in front of you today. Receiving is different from taking whatever drifts by. It pays attention, the way listening to a person across the table is different from hearing noise from another room.
So the next time you see the years ahead at the table, you do not have to look away, and you do not have to solve it. Nobody can be told to feel something. Anyone can be told to turn toward the table. Pass the salt, and look at who is there.