“Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite: this also is vanity and striving after the wind.” Ecc. 6:9
My husband found a lightbulb in the yard last week. It is the tenth one we’ve found strewn around the wild edges of our property. They didn’t always lay amongst long grass and dead leaves. Once upon a time they belonged to a long cord which skirted the outline of our peaked roof high above our second storey deck. These scattered bulbs lit our patio so cozy and nice. Then one day after a windstorm I noticed a couple of bulbs missing. I thought it strange, but assumed the wind ripped them off. The next day I noticed more missing. Upon closer inspection my husband concluded they were chewed off the strand. Squirrels, he grumbled. By the end of the week, a squirrel had carried away twenty-one of the twenty-six lights, leaving a naked cord hanging in darkness.
Turns out the bird feeders I hung on our patio attracted the squirrels. One squirrel was enticed with a more appealing optionꟷan abundance of glittering pinecone-like pods extending symmetrically across a thin long branch. I suppose if you’re a squirrel, you’d think you had found winter’s jackpot!
My husband and I laugh now at the feat this squirrel performed to gather his newfound treasure. Not only did he have to scale twenty feet of posts to reach the strand of lights, but he also balanced across the thin wire strand, chewed through the plastic base of the lightbulb without dropping the shiny gem, then carried it all the way back to his winter’s stash atop the towering elm tree on the edge of our property. This determined critter, eyes fixed on the anticipation of the sparkling treasure he found, repeated this feat twenty-one times to store up for the coming winter.
How thwarted he must have felt one cold January day as he bit into this prized possession and got a mouth full of icky rubber and brittle glass. One by one the treasure proved not as it seemed and the disappointed squirrel tossed the lightbulbs into the snow-covered leaves below. We’ve been finding them for two years now.
All that glitters is not gold.
How like that squirrel are we? Oh, how roving our hearts are!
As Adam’s offspring, we are born incomplete. You see God has put eternity in our hearts (Ecc. 3:11). Sin from the Fall has left that space in our heartsꟷintended solely for Godꟷempty. We go to great lengths to attempt to fill this spiritual void (infinite in size) with material things (finite in size). Bored of our mundane lives we spend our days chasing after everything that glitters hoping that it might be the thing to complete us. Our efforts fall short every time because God created us for a greater purposeꟷto know and enjoy him.
Finding our soul’s satisfaction is a lot like Cinderella’s glass slipper: there’s only one perfect match. That deep longing in our soul can only be filled by knowing Jesus Christ. He is the most valuable treasure of all, infinitely sized to perfectly fill that limitless space in our hearts. When find him by his grace, we let go of everything else. The empty treasures we once sought fall to the ground one by oneꟷanother lightbulb crashing into a bed of long dead leaves from the crown of an ancient elm tree.
Take Up and Read
Matthew 11:28-30
Matthew 13:44-46
John 4:1-26
Psalm 73:25
Psalm 37:4
The Light for My Path 