He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, 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. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live… – Ecclesiastes 3:11-12 Leo Tolstoy once asked, “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” This is the statement also found in Ecclesiastes 3: “There is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live.” The problem is finding that which makes us “joyful” and finding the work that is “good.” “Joy” is a state of mind that we dispose ourselves towards and therefore is a crooked type of contentment that shines forth despite of any emotion of happiness. For example, the father of an infant isn’t necessarily happy when he is awakened at 3:42AM to a baby’s crying; however in holding that child, he is joyful of having the opportunity of being with the baby. As a result, the “good” work to be done is to live into the present state of our lives and savor the flavor it leaves behind in our mouths and in our lives because it is the disposition of joy towards what God has gifted to us– an opportunity to live in and through circumstances. I know that sounds highly ethereal and too farfetching to be practical, so let me present to you what we need to think about when Solomon wrote this. The mindset of having “joy” comes from seeing the beauty of our lives in the awkwardness and uncomfortableness that we experience. If you think back on your life, you recognize, almost instantaneously, that we are shaped to be who we are by our pain and suffering. What if we look into our life and see the beauty that came from that pain and suffering– as if there can be any. My pops recalled often a time when my brother and I were young and I had suddenly fell ill– like I stopped breathing and just passed out and so he called 9-1-1 and they waited and waited, fearing the worst. EMS arrived and took me and my mother toward the hospital, but we never got there– the ambulance got into an accident with a drunk driver. En route to the hospital, my brother falls into a coma, for some unknown reason and in a blink of an eye, he was at the brink of losing two children and a wife. The chaos, agony, and uncertainty would certainly change a man– drive him mad; yet there was beauty in those circumstances and an eternity put into his heart by God that he did not realize– the brevity of life was given to do something good because death destroys. There is nothing better in life we can seek than the beauty found through reality and working to do good through them in our lives. Pleasure finds itself when we are disposed toward joy the innate joy of eternity in our hearts.