“The grinders are few.” Your teeth are falling out.
“People rise up at the sound of birds, but their songs grow faint.” You get up really early, but though your ears are bigger than they used to be, you can’t hear the birds anymore.
Ecclesiastes 12 paints a cryptic picture of what growing older is like. It’s a guessing game to figure out exactly what the various descriptions are really about so it can be enlightening to brainstorm about them. For instance, the author writes, “… and the clouds return after the rain” (vs. 2). What does that mean? Perhaps the author is describing the troubles, the difficult issues, which we face as we get older.
A fourteen year-old has to deals with some issue, and when that difficulty passes, she can anticipate a Sabbath between problems. For an eighteen year-old, the Sabbaths are shorter. The older we get, the closer the issues – the closer the clouds – are. Ultimately, as we age, it’s like there is one right after the other.
So we conclude that when a man with issues marries a woman with issues to live in a home where there are new developing issues, it is going to be true that when you don’t issues, you probably don’t have a pulse.
Every couple has issues. Sometimes those issues are very, very complicated. Yet those issues do not have to become bigger than your commitment, your faith, or your God. They do not have to be bigger than your marriage. This is a true statement: “Nothing is impossible with God.”
Got issues? Got a pulse?
Overcoming is not always as we hope; nor as easy as some of our friends think it should be.
Yet, God has a way. Pursue him. Discover what he has said in Scripture about your issue and do what he says. Commit to it – long term – and let him bring you the harvest (Galatians 6:9).