If people in biblical times grew old at about the same rate that we do today (and there is reason to believe that they did; the ninetieth psalm says the average person lives to age “threescore and ten,” that is, about age seventy, and the exceptional person to age eighty), then I can picture Ecclesiastes as a man in his mid-to late forties, perhaps close to fifty. He is at about the same point in his life that I am in mine. And he is beginning to be afraid that he is running out of time. The years ahead are almost certainly fewer than the years behind, and he still is not sure that he has done anything meaningful with his life. He may be looking back with regret on wasted times and wasted opportunities.

I sometimes think of this as the “instant coffee” theory of life. When you open a jar of instant coffee, you dole it out in generous, heaping spoonfuls, because after all, you have a whole full jar of it and you see that you are only using a little at a time. By the time you get down toward the bottom of the jar, you realize that you don’t have all that much left, and your portions are more carefully measured. You reach after every last grain in the corner of the jar. I think we tend to treat time that way. Young people think that they will live forever. They assume that they have all the time in the world. They can afford to “invest” their time in activities that will not pay dividends until well into the future. They take entry-level jobs and low-paying apprenticeships as a foothold in the working world. They date people they know they will not marry because they are developing the skills of relating to another person.

But as we get older, halfway down the coffee jar, we learn not to be so casual with our time because we understand that it will not last forever. We stop asking the young person’s question – How high will I rise? How far will I get? – questions which are answered in terms of success and competition, and we start asking the questions which haunted the author of Ecclesiastes – What will I heave accomplished? What difference will I have made? What will be left of me when my time is over? – questions which are answered on the basis of things shared with other people. It is a sign of maturity when we stop asking, What does life have in store for me? And start asking, What am I doing with my life? Some examples of that process at work:

When I turned forty-five, I cut back on giving sermons and teaching classes and began to write books, as a way of bringing my ideas to people even when I was not physically present with them. Till then, I had dealt in spoken words, and words vanish as soon as you utter them. Without realizing it, I had begun to feel the need to express myself in a more permanent medium.

A friend of mine who owns a gas station, when he was in his early forties, changed the name of the station from “Maple Street Garage” to “AI Jones’ Garage.” Like me, he responded to middle age by wanting to see his name written on something permanent, not only in spoken words.