inkling-sEcclesiastes 9:11
Anyone who has watched a clearly better team lose, or a careful plan undone by a single unlucky Tuesday, knows the thing this verse is looking at. Qoheleth has been around long enough to notice a pattern the motivational posters leave out: the fastest runner does not always cross the line first. He lists them almost like a scoreboard — the swift, the strong, the wise, the intelligent, the knowledgeable — every category we spend our lives trying to climb into, believing that if we are only good enough, the outcome will follow. And then he sets the whole ledger down with one flat observation: <em>time and chance happen to them all</em>.
It is worth noticing what he does not say. He does not say the training was pointless, or that the swift should stop running. Speed still helps; wisdom still matters; being prepared is better than being caught off guard. What he refuses to grant is the quiet superstition underneath our effort — the belief that merit is a machine, that if we simply assemble enough skill and diligence, the result becomes ours to command. It is not. A market turns. A diagnosis arrives. A door we knocked on for years finally opens — for someone who wandered by. The strongest among us is still standing in weather he did not order.
This is not a counsel of despair; it is a counsel of proportion. We do our work, and we hold the outcome a little more loosely, because we were never the ones setting the odds. The honest runner laces up, trains hard, runs his best — and then, having done all he can, lets the race be the kind of thing a race actually is.
“God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm.”
— William Cowper · Light Shining out of Darkness (Olney Hymns, 1774)Cowper takes up the very things Qoheleth watches — the sea, the storm, the run of events that to us looks like sheer chance — and finds a purpose moving in them. Where Qoheleth stops at the honest edge of what anyone can see, the hymn dares to name what faith trusts beyond it: the God who 'plants his footsteps in the sea' walks straight through the deep we cannot read, and 'rides upon the storm' we never ordered. Time and chance are real — but they are not the hand on the tiller.