Nobody like to waste time. If someone hasn’t done the job and it costs us time and effort, we get angry. If a company promised to deliver by a certain date and it misses the deadline, we are furious. If somebody does the job wrong, and we have to redo it, we hate it. We hate to waste time.

But some of the hard work we do is also wasted. Work may feel valuable because it fills our time. It feels worthwhile if we do it faithfully. But not everything we do has value. Some of it keeps us from doing more important things. Workaholics spend less time with family. Please concerned with their own lives may volunteer less for others. Our work and our lives are important, but sometimes not as important as we think.

Qoheleth says everything is vanity; everything is worthless. We spend our lives gaining wisdom, knowledge and skill, but at death we give all our property to someone who has not worked for it. We work all day long. We spend our days in sorrow and grief, and our nights without rest. The writer’s bleak descriptions keep us humble about our work. We may not be as important as we thought.

Perhaps God gets frustrated with us, too. Why do we waste our time? The time we spend with God is never wasted at all.