Looking at Christ

Ecclesiastes 1 is a great Easter passage.  4 Generations come and generations go,     but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises and the sun sets,     and hurries back to where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south     and turns to the north; round and round it goes,     ever returning on its course. 7 All streams flow into the sea,     yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from,     there they return again. 8 All things are wearisome,     more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing,     nor the ear its fill of hearing. 9 What has been will be again,     what has been done will be done again;     there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which one can say,     “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago;     it was here before our time. 11 No one remembers the former generations,   ...

You know that experience of finding everything just slightly frustrated: The computer that you got two months ago starts crashing. There's a tiny leak slowly soaking the kitchen floor.  The car, which you haven't moved for a month, has a flat battery.  You put up a shelf and it's just slightly off horizontal. Only you will notice, or someone who looks very carefully, but you're annoyed that it is not right. You’ve proof read the manuscript twenty times but the moment you press send you realise there’s a typo on page one. A social media message misinterpreted opens a can of worms. The biscuits/cake/meal you’ve spent an hour preparing stays in the oven or on the stove just five minutes too long. It’s still edible but has that acrid taste round the edges. This is not real suffering. It's not  bereavement, pain, trauma. It's not a 14 hour shift in a PPE suit tending to the critically ill. It's not losing your job. It's not living under constan...