Not only was the Teacher wise, but he also imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true.
Ecclesiastes 12:9-10 (NIV)
The Teacher Took His Time
The man on the low table has nothing to do, and everyone else in the room does. He’s in his sixties, one knee bent, hands flat at his sides, and the numbers come at him from a foot away. The therapist beside him says every one of them, all the way down, for a motion that looks like nothing at all from the door.
He could count in his head, and he’s said so more than once. They both know the knee would get stronger either way. She says them anyway, because he needs to hear where he is in the set. His wife is in the chair against the wall with her coat still on, and she’s the one who knows the whole count by heart by now.
The Teacher was wise, and he didn’t keep it. He imparted knowledge to the people, pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs, searched again to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true.
This is the same Teacher who says everything is meaningless. He’d looked at the work people do and the days they get and he’d called all of it meaningless, and he went back over his sentences until they were right, for the people who were going to read them.
The Teacher went looking for the words a person reads over breakfast, and they go by a good deal faster than the looking took. Reading one of them slowly costs a few minutes, and the few minutes are the whole of it.
The set finishes. He pushes himself upright, works his foot into his shoe, and takes his time getting to the door. Eight weeks of afternoons in that room, and that was the last of them.
A Prayer to Remember
I’ve read your words at the speed of a road sign, Lord, sure I knew where they were going before I got to the end of them. Slow me down in front of what you actually said. Let me stay there until I’ve heard it, even if the morning goes and nothing else gets done.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
