Psalm 119:37 – Futility!

Turn my eyes away from looking at what is futile;
Give me life in your pathway.

This one seems pretty obvious. Recently we looked at Isaiah 55:2 – “Why spend your money on what is not food, and your labor for what doesn’t satisfy.” The question becomes exactly what is vain? What is futile?

There are many things that people describe as futile, or not worth spending your time on. It’s very easy for us to start to equate God’s way (the non-futile way) with what we imagine is a good idea. I’ve encountered church people who thought any form of imagination or fiction was vanity and futility, but in turn spent hours gossiping, passing on information which not one of them need, and from which they will never benefit.

There are people who call time spent in prayer futile, because one is not busy making money. You need to take care of that first, they’ll tell you. Others see spirituality as the greatest reality and think any sort of detailed study of scripture is a waste of time because people don’t really need to know all that stuff. God will tell them what they need to know. They’re matched by those who think any time spent in meditation or other spiritual activities is wasted, since they can be misled by all that stuff. They should spend their time on scripture and serious theology.

I know that my parents were told that they were not raising me right because I didn’t get enough social activities, but rather spent too much of my time reading books and playing with electrical equipment. This attitude is often matched by those who argue the balance of social activities, sports, and more intellectual things for students. Some “serious” people think you should get rid of frivolities as art and music. They’re a waste of money, aka “vanity.”

I recall attending a computer show back in 1980 with a friend of mine. The whole show fit in one classroom at the university. My friend and I were discussing the possibility that one day computers would be able to drive cars. Someone at one of the exhibitor’s tables was listening to us and told us we were being frivolous. If we thought such things could happen we really had no understanding of computers at all. If we ever wanted to do anything in the industry, we needed to get serious. For him, “looking at vain things” was imagining a world in which cars might drive themselves.

I wonder what he would have thought if we had expressed a much more frivolous thought, by his standards, and talked about a car that you could summon by pressing a button. We had no such idea at the time. I was watching a discussion about a new beta option from Tesla that can do just that, using GPS to locate you. Ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. And in beta testing. The discussion was about the safety of proving actual customers with beta features. I vote no, but nobody asked me!

The point I’m making here is that a verse of this sort gives us a simple truth. We need to look for God’s way, or more precisely, allow God to “enliven” us in that path. But that simple truth is the door to a great deal more. It’s very easy to dismiss useful things as futile, and embrace futile things as truly important. One key is always just where it is that you’re going.

And that leads me to the next thing. It’s Sunday. I spent some time thinking about this one!

How narrowly do you define “God’s path”? For many, if you’re spiritually oriented, everything has to be about religion. So the pastor is much more spiritual and much more “on God’s path” than say the doctor, or the engineer, the fantasy author, the comedian, or the artist. But all of these are part of God’s world. Futility would be to pursue something that is not your calling.

Don’t assume that you know what is futile. Think about it. Seriously.

What is God’s path for you? Can you think of some job you’ve looked down on as doing something less valuable than you do? Should you reconsider?

(Featured image from Adobe Stock, By Sergey Nivens. Licensed, not public domain.)