Judah

Written in memory of our fourth son, Judah Tucker Burlingame,
born already in heaven on the afternoon of October 20th.

“Hevel, hevel, all is hevel, a vapor, a breath, meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
The Teacher looked upon everything done under the sun:
the labor of the hands, the brilliance of the mind,
the wisdom of the wise and the folly of the fool.
Time swallows them all.

Yesterday I read this summary of Ecclesiastes:
“Go climb a mountain, and see if it cares.”

Today I read the story of William Shanks and thought,
“Go move a mountain, and see if it even matters.”

In the 1800s, William Shanks spent twenty years calculating the digits of π by hand.
Before he started, 500 digits were already established.
He died believing he had reached 707 places,
a lifetime of patience and precision for those couple hundred decimals.
Decades later, machines revealed his work was wrong after the 527th digit.
Two decades of devotion, undone in an instant.

Was it meaningless?
When we work only for achievement or reputation or pleasure,
our efforts vanish like breath on a mirror.
This is true for both the mathematician and the pastor,
the CEO, the mother, and the missionary.
Under the sun, vanity can infiltrate any of it.

In any career or passion or charity,
it doesn’t matter if it seems to add up to us or not.
Our effort is often more similar to Shanks than we realize,
trying to calculate something irrational.

But when the heart says, “Your kingdom come, not mine,”
our toil begins to reach beyond the sun.
The work becomes worship.

In the book of Genesis, take a look at Leah’s story.
She named her first three sons out of longing,
Reuben, Simeon, Levi,
to be seen, to be heard, to be chosen.
But by the time she bore her fourth, something shifted.

Leah gave up on finding her worth under the sun.
She labored for so long, her eyes weak,
unwilling to move another mountain just to be recognized by her husband.
And there, she surrendered.

It wasn’t a giving in to her desires,
the cheap substitute the enemy provides,
“Now I will live my truth,”
allowing bitterness to name her freedom.

She turned neither outward nor inward, but upward.
And there, in the hevel, God met her
when her gaze lifted beyond the sun.

Our hope is not in the dust,
but in the breath that filled Adam.
God breathed life into him,
and that is all we have to offer back:
a vapor, a breath, a praise.

That was the offering Leah made.

She gave birth to her fourth son and said,

“This time, I will praise the Lord.”

“That is his name,” she whispered.

“Judah.”

— Nathan Burlingame