3 August 2025 #chooseyourhard
My daughter and I had a conversation a few weeks back about life choices. She said something that reminded me of the readings this week: “We all choose our hard.” ‘Choosing your hard’ means that every choice has a hard consequence: To be overweight means that it’s hard to move with agility and ease, but to be slender is to make the hard choices not to eat particular foods that you might love. To choose to stay married can be hard but so is the single life, especially when children are involved. To stay in a well-paying job you don’t like is hard, but so is un- or under-employment. Moving into an Assisted Living facility or downsizing is hard, but so is staying in a house you can’t keep up. In the end, she said, we all “choose our hard.”
The Hebrew word used in the Ecclesiastes reading today is hevel and means something like inconsequential, futile, meaningless, or in the case of our NAB reading, vanity. It’s not the vanity of spending inordinate amounts of time in front the mirror because you like what you see, it’s the other definition of vanity… which is to spend inordinate amounts of time in front of the mirror hoping that Chris Hemsworth or Scarlett Johannsen will look back. Pointless. [Unless you actually are Chris or Scarlett, but I would put money on the odds that even they look in the mirror some days hoping someone else looks back.]
This is what the world wants you to think: Spend all your energies on pleasure, update your looks or wardrobe, accumulate wealth, be popular, and chase after your professional goals at the expense of everything else. It’s hard and time-consuming work, for sure. Everyone does this thing called making-a-life or participating-in-the-rat-race, whether one loves God (follows the wisdom of the Bible) or not. The author of Ecclesiastes wonders… since the toil, anxiety, sorrow, and grief of all this work is just plain hard, why do we do it? What is the point?
St. Paul does a little variation-on-that-theme to remind us that we should stop lying to ourselves if we think the Christian life is easier than the non-Christian life. It’s not. We live in a culture of immorality, disordered passions, evil desires, illness, insecurity, and every other harsh reality. Christians are not immune to these things any more than non-Christians. Choosing to be a disciple of Jesus is hard. So is a secular life without God. We toil and labor, are anxious of heart, and our days can be filled with sorrow and grief, whether we love Jesus or not.
Jesus tells us - and I am paraphrasing here - to “choose your hard.” We can spend our time toiling to fill our silos with the goal of comfort and ease and amassing wealth for this earthly life. Or we can spend our time toiling to fill our silos with the goal of amassing Goodness, Truth, and Beauty for heaven. Either way is hard work. So. Which way will you choose… Earthly accolades? Or eternal rewards?
#chooseyourhard