Sunday Service

The same thing, and also another student, Jason Tucker, perhaps, I'm not sure if Jason's fully on track for that, but he's at least heading in that direction. So pray for these men as they prepare for licensure, that would mean that they were licensed to preach and eligible to receive a call to minister somewhere.

So pray for God's work in their lives as they prepare for all of this. And speaking about presbytery, we are hosting the presbytery this time. Most of you already know that, and we're really looking forward to that.

The men will be coming in on Wednesday, and we have a meal on Wednesday evening. And then we're gonna be having the meetings over at the Bedford PCA Church. And they have very graciously offered us the use of their building for these meetings on Thursday and Friday.

So we're very grateful to them. Several pastors in the area are going to come and bring greetings to the presbytery. So we're very thankful for that as well. It's a good time of encouragement and having other brothers there that we can have fellowship with.

And I want to encourage you that you're welcome to come to any of the meetings of the presbytery. And I sent out yesterday, I sent out a docket of the meetings so you can look and see what's going on, and you can come over to some of the different things that are going on.

Especially, I want to encourage all of you to come on Thursday evening. We will have a full worship service on Thursday evening. Missionary Tom Van Manen will be preaching, and we'll have the Lord's Supper.

Michael Bartsch is going to be leading the rest of the service other than the preaching and administering the Lord's Supper. So that's a time when many times the hosting congregation does attend that service.

So I encourage you to do so. The church is at 49 Nelson's Landing Boulevard in Bedford. I also want to thank all of you in the congregation who have done so much to help out with hosting the presbytery.

There's a lot to do, and we provide meals for them, and some of you are providing lodging, and we really appreciate all that you've done. There are a couple of other things going on this week as well.

You can have a very busy week if you want to with a lot of church things. But Covenanters is having their 25th anniversary, and they are having special services on Tuesday. So that's something. You can look at the bulletin for details on that.

And the Bedford church I was just speaking about, they're having their 50th anniversary on the weekend, and Sunday evening they have a service at five o 'clock. They don't usually have a Sunday evening service, but they're planning to start once a month Sunday evening services.

So we really encourage them in that way, and if you want to go over and encourage them in this first one, it's part of their anniversary celebration, then you're certainly encouraged to do that as well.

That will be next Lord's Day. So as I say, there are a lot of announcements. Be sure and check the back table. There's always new things back there. I think you know that recently the Reform Perspective came out and a few other things.

But there is also a new table talk for October that's out there. This is the inside. They have an outside cover on it as well, so they're on the back table there. And so you're welcome to pick one of those up if you need that.

And I believe that is all the announcements that I need to make. So please stand as we prepare to come before the living God to worship him as an assembly of his people. And I'm going to, we'll have a time of silence to prepare our hearts to come before the great God.

And I'll ask Ilya to come up and lead our service after that with our call to worship and so on. So let's take a moment to prepare our hearts before the Lord.

Amen. Please remain standing for the call to worship which comes to us from 1 Corinthians 1 .18 -19. For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever. I will set aside. Let us now remain standing and approach our God in a time of prayer. Almighty God, we thank you, Lord.

We praise you and we adore you. On this beautiful Sabbath morning, Lord, we are so overwhelmed by the thought that the great creator of the universe, the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings knows us and loves us personally.

We are in awe of the fact that we have brought into fellowship with you, not for anything that we have done or on the merit of any of our works, but by the gracious work of Jesus on our behalf. Lord, this stretches our comprehension.

We cannot possibly wrap our minds around this. And Lord, while it is foolishness to the world, we know that we, too, used to scoff at this great message of hope and salvation and are therefore so humbled by the fact that by the spirit, we now not only understand this, but believe this and live by it.

Lord, we ask that you would give us the strength by your spirit to be salt and light standing on the firm message of the gospel. And we ask, Lord, that this time of worship would be acceptable to you and a reflection of the great salvation purchased for us by Calvary.

We ask, Lord, that you would rule us from on high and be with us today, and we ask all these things in Jesus' precious name, amen. Please remain standing for our creed, which comes to us from the Apostles' Creed, which you can find in your Trinity hymnal on page 845.

A beautiful, succinct summary of the Christian faith, not because it's infallible, but because, once again, it so well preserves the core, basic teaching of scripture. And so together, as a church, with centuries before us, and, Lord willing, for many to come, we confess.

Church, in who do you believe? I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, but born of the Virgin Mary.

He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day, he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty.

From there, he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Amen. Thank you, you may be seated. And now we approach our New Testament reading from Luke chapter 12. Luke chapter 12, verse 13 to 21. What we find here is a man who is seen as a fool, not because he works hard and plans for the future.

This is not a passage of scripture that is trying to teach us that investing is bad or something like that, but pay careful attention to where this man's hope truly lies. And remember that when we approach the word later during our sermon time.

So from Luke chapter 12, beginning in verse 13. Then one from the crowd said to him, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. But he, that is Jesus, said to him, man, who made me a judge or an arbiter over you?

And he said to them, take heed and beware of covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses. Then he spoke a parable to them saying, the ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully.

And he thought within himself saying, what shall I do since I have no room to store my crops? So he said, I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build greater. And there I will store all my crops and my goods.

And I will say to my soul, soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, fool, this night your soul will be required of you. Then whose will those things be which you have provided?

So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. Indeed, may we not be fools. And as we now come closer to our time in the word, our song of assurance in our God comes to us from Psalm 62, selection A.

You may be seated. You have your Bibles with you this morning. Please open up to Ecclesiastes chapter one. Ecclesiastes chapter one, beginning in verse one and reading the first 11 verses. Hear now the word of the Lord from Ecclesiastes chapter one.

The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanity says the preacher. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What prophet has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun?

One generation passes away and another generation comes, but the earth abides forever. The sun also rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes toward the south and turns around to the north.

The wind whirls about continually and comes again on its circuit. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the place from which the rivers come, return again. All things are full of labor.

Man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is what will be. That which is done is what will be done. And there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which it may be said, see, this is new? It has already been in ancient times before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who will come after.

The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of the Lord endures forever. Let us approach him in a time of prayer as we now come to study his word together. Almighty God, we thank you for the great privilege and pleasure that it is to have your word.

We thank you, Lord, that we have it so close to us, so readily accessible, Lord. No excuse not to be deeply engrossed in your word, and yet we know how weak our flesh is. We know, Lord, how much strength and time it often feels like it requires.

Lord, we believe, but help our unbelief. Lord, we struggle, and we come before you asking that you would bring us back to your word, that we, by reading it and seeing it, would fall deeper in love with it, understanding that our God was good to speak to us clearly and was gracious to teach us in a way that we can understand.

How wonderful it is to have a word, Lord, that is unsearchable and in its depth, and yet preaches a clear gospel message that even children can understand. Lord, as we come to Ecclesiastes now, we know sometimes that the wisdom literature is difficult for us to understand.

And we ask, Lord, that the preaching this morning would be blessed by you, that we would not rely on our own strength, on our ability to preach or to understand, Lord, to give or to receive the word, but rely solely on you, that we together, Lord, would come to what is oftentimes a difficult piece of text for us and learn from it sincerely.

Help us by your spirit, Lord, to have open hearts and minds, clarity of thought. And Lord, we ask that in all these things, you alone would be glorified, asking all these things in Jesus' precious name, amen.

Ecclesiastes and the Absurdity of Life Without God

When I was in university, I was a bit of a music fiend. And sometimes as it happens in life, there's a particular season where you're especially listening to one kind of music or one particular musician.

And one that I was absolutely enamored with in university was a gentleman by the name of Father John Misty. Obviously, that's not his real name, but that's what he went by. And for most of the time that I listened to him, I didn't really pay attention all that much to the lyrics.

I thought that he waxed pretty eloquently and the music was very interesting and that was sort of enough for me. But at almost exactly the middle of my university journey in 2017, he released probably his most critically acclaimed album and it's called Pure Comedy.

And in the music world, it's what's known as a concept album, which is to say that the 11 or 13 or however many songs, I can't recall anymore, that there were in there were not about 11 or 13 separate ideas.

He's developing one theme throughout the whole thing. And because it's called Pure Comedy, the idea that he's trying to convey is that the world is absurd and the only way that it can be described is as a pure comedy.

That's the title track. And in the title track, he looks around at everything and he says, isn't it ridiculous that we have these people that are so incompetent and yet they're in the highest positions of authority?

He calls them goons and fools. He looks at creation even and he says, isn't it bizarre? And this is a near perfect quotation of the song that all babies are born with an iron deficiency. Why is childbirth so painful?

Why does anything happen the way that it does? Surely this is for nothing and by nothing. And after listening to that song for so long and not really getting the idea behind it, at a certain point I started to realize, isn't it so interesting that an unbelieving musician has so perfectly described his own worldview?

Nothing that he's saying is objectively true, but from his perspective, isn't that the case? And so the thesis of the song really is that look at how crazy the world is around us. You gotta laugh so you don't cry.

The best we've got is to just sort of ride this one out and try to enjoy it while we can and not fuss too much about how crazy everything is. He really didn't leave much to the imagination. He basically says exactly that.

And while on the one hand that might seem a little bit refreshing, on the other hand, it's so tragic because when you consider that this particular gentleman whose real name is Josh Tillman, he grew up in a Christian home.

And I don't know the details of his upbringing or anything like that, but I do know that he was raised in at least what has been described as an evangelical home in Maryland. So chances are very, very high that at one point he has come up against the gospel.

He has heard it proclaimed in one way or another to one degree of clarity or another. And then that begins to become very sad and tragic because a man who has accurately painted a non-believer's perspective of the world around him has the antidote to that lack of hope and has thoroughly rejected it.

And what happens is that when we read a passage from Ecclesiastes almost anywhere, what we think to ourselves is surely that is written to the Mr. Tillmans of the world, those who have no hope and have no way to account for anything in their life.

The reality, however, is that Ecclesiastes is written to us as Christians because that Tillman spirit, that idea that oftentimes we look around at the world that feels like it doesn't make any sense because we have so much emphasis on the things that we do by our own effort, that is a perennial human problem.

With Mr. Tillman, this is simply what it looks like for a very honest unbeliever to paint that reality. But the core and the heart of that resides in every man, must be confronted and must be dealt with.

In other words, it's one problem with the same solution for everyone, whether you accept it or reject it. And so we consider from Ecclesiastes chapter one in the very first verses of what may at times feel like a difficult book to understand that fundamentally man was made for God and therefore in God, you not only find meaning in some general sense, but everything holding together in him and that ultimately the point and the purpose of this life is to live with God in you, God in man.

And so we will consider this by the contrary. We will look at man against his labor, man against time and man against creation. Man against labor, man against time and man against creation. We begin with the first verses, the words of the preacher, the son of David, King in Jerusalem, vanity of vanity says the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

We're going to really slow down in these first few verses because since we understand every single word in the English language that's said here, sometimes we can speed right past it and miss the context that's going to hold the rest of the book together.

And we're not going to do this whole Hebrew lesson, but just bear with me for a moment. We're going to translate two words. The first is teacher. Some translations have it as preacher. That is the Hebrew word, Kohelet.

And that matters because the root of that word is the Hebrew word for, is the Hebrew word, kahal, which can mean an assembly or a congregation. That word appears multiple times in the Old Testament. And when it was translated into the Greek, the word that they chose for that was Ecclesia, which might sound more familiar to you.

That is the word church. So in other words, the person that is writing this book of scripture is speaking as a preacher, but not as a preacher out there somewhere on the corner or a missionary. He's saying this directly as a sermon to Christians.

That's how Ecclesiastes has to be framed. This is fundamentally for us. This is not describing to Christians how sad it is to be a non-believer out there in the world. It is trying to get us to consider certain things.

And what is it primarily forcing us to consider? Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. That's the second word we're going to translate. It's the Hebrew word, havel. And it means a breath, quite literally.

It's got a number of different translations, but at its root, at its core, that's what it's trying to say. It's something that's fleeting, impossible to hold onto. If that's what vanity is, then vanity of vanities is that par excellence.

It's gone as soon as it came. It's a breath. You can't hold onto it. It's a vapor. The sermon of Ecclesiastes is trying to speak to Christians and saying that all things on their own merit are nothing but a fleeting breath.

It then forces the question further in verse three. What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun? Once again, considering it on its own merits, because that's how this is being presented to us initially.

On its own merit, nothing lasts or is worthwhile. We know this from just about every job or vocation, or really any way that we spend our time here as people. Yesterday, I went to get the oil changed in my car.

And I was reminded about how often you need to take a car to a mechanic. Better or worse, more often, less often, the idea is still the same. And as a mechanic, you provide a very useful service. People need to get around.

Their life depends on it in many ways. And so as a mechanic, you're helping people to do that. But you understand, if you really take a step back and think about it, that the most you're doing is you're simply prolonging the life of that car until it needs to be fixed again.

And then again, and then again. And then eventually, it's prohibitively expensive or just not worth the time. And so the point is that the work that you do as a mechanic on its own merit, it's not eternal, can't last forever.

It's futile up to a certain point. And you may do that for years and decades, but what is years and decades compared to all of history? It's a mere vapor, it's a breath. Scripture calls it a vanity. But it's not just for the actual physical vocations that we have, the work that we do.

The mothers in this room understand something very similar to that idea. You raise children, you pour your heart into them, you lose nights of sleep, you do all of these various things. And you know that the vast majority of the things that you do for your children and your family will go unnoticed and unthanked.

Not because you have a bad family, but because it's just not realistic to have everything be noticed. They see the end result, but they don't see everything that goes on behind it. And again, on its own merit.

We have to stress that if that's all that we were doing, then you're simply getting a human being from one stage of development to the next. And that's all that that would be. And all that that took, the vast majority of it, unnoticed, unthanked.

We can give hundreds of examples like this. We can reduce it down to absurdity. And some people will even say, well, you're reducing it to absurdity, that's not fair. It's not fair because it's inconvenient.

But it is the truth. Anything on its own merit will force us to ask the question, why am I doing this? Not for nothing, one of the ways that we see this the clearest is when kids ask us the question, why?

If you let a child ask why, oftentimes there will be 15 more whys after that. And at a certain point you start running out of answers. I don't know, that's just what we do. That's an extremely unsatisfying answer.

It's a big problem, isn't it? Many Christians understand this issue. And they've tried to resolve it by saying, ah, so therefore I will only do explicitly Christian things in my life. Of course, there are certain vocations that are off limits for Christians, but many have gone to this point of saying, therefore, everything that I do has to have some very clear Christian application to it.

Because then I will escape the problem. Then it's not vanity. And therefore that means that there are maybe three or four different jobs that Christians can work. But that itself is actually a misunderstanding of the text as well.

Because as the helpful saying goes, a Christian cobbler doesn't glorify God by putting crosses on his shoes. A Christian cobbler glorifies God by making really good shoes. The point isn't to say that there are some things that are vanity and some things that are not.

No, all of it is vanity. All of it is vanity on its own merit. But done for the glory of God, by the power of his spirit, suddenly anything short of sin, of course, has to be said, but any legitimate work suddenly becomes work that's being done for the glory of God.

And our endeavors finally have meaning. Because it's not the work itself, that's the be all and end all. It's being a good steward for and by God, man for God, God in man. And the thing is, we've talked about, again, trying to narrow down that problem.

We can think sometimes that this is text written for those people out there, and we've brought it a little bit closer to home. And then we said, okay, fine. This is written to us, but surely there are some things that are naturally vanity and some that aren't.

No, they're all vanity if done outside of God. And to make the problem even bigger, so to speak, this is one of the oldest issues that mankind has dealt with. The reason why we translated the word for vanity, Havel, is because there was a person in scripture with that exact name.

And maybe it sounds familiar, maybe it doesn't, but you certainly know the character of Abel in scripture, from Cain and Abel. That's his name, Havel. And his brother Cain had the name, which means to acquire or to get.

So speaking it in sort of like John Bunyan terms, acquire brings an offering that God does not accept. And breath or vapor brings an acceptable offering to God. And Cain looks at his brother who did nothing wrong against him personally.

He simply did what God asked. But Cain can't have that. He demands that his offering be acceptable on its own merits. God did not bless it, God did not sanction it. And he says, no, this is unacceptable.

And so he turns his own brother into his namesake. He extinguishes his life into a vapor. And while that might sound so out there, so extreme, scripture forces us to consider that in fact it isn't. This is the normal default state of the human heart.

If it wasn't, why would it be in only the fourth chapter of scripture? Moreover, if it wasn't, why does James 4 .2 say, you desire and do not have, so you murder. Are we to believe that the people that James was writing his letter to were going around stabbing each other to death?

No, but the idea being that when there is a misplaced focus in our life, and we believe something of vanity to be worthwhile on its own merits, and we stake our meaning and purpose in that, then what oftentimes happens is that that's not how the rest of the world sees it.

That provokes us to wrath. I worked very hard on this. I tried. How dare you not see what I'm seeing in all of this? And scripture connects anger and murder very closely. This is the problem, and now it's a very big problem.

We thought that this was maybe for other people, and now it's causing us to consider that this is actually a very, very major issue that we deal with. What is the solution? If vanity is a mere breath that evaporates and is gone as early as it came, scripture actually speaks of a different kind of breath, one that is animating and life-giving.

It is the very spirit of God. Genesis 2 says that the spirit of God hovered over the waters. It's that same word. It's the breath of God. The word of God itself is God-breathed, 2 Timothy tells us. And so therefore, in Ephesians, we are instructed not to get drunk on wine, but to be filled with the spirit, the very breath of God, to fill us and to animate us.

And in fact, that very word, to fill, in Greek, is not so much as filling a cup as much as it is filling the sail of a ship. It is something that is dynamic and propels us. Otherwise, verse nine causes us to consider again.

That which has been done is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. Exactly, on its own merits, nothing new under the sun. But for a Christian who is not holding on to the mere vapors of this world, but is instead filled with the spirit of God, he can wake up every morning and say that there are new mercies.

And doesn't need to ask 15 why questions. That becomes enough for him because he is in the presence of God. Christian, is that where your value and hope is this morning? Is it in Christ's work on your behalf or is it in your labor that you demand be acceptable on its own merits between others and before God?

This is what it looks like for man to be against his labor. Now we consider man against time. And this takes us to verse four. One generation passes away and another generation comes, but the earth abides forever.

Time is a central idea here, a central focus. Time cannot be controlled or mastered. It doesn't ask your permission. The closest we can do is to theorize about how time can be warped and whatnot and all the rest of it, but you can't dictate it and you can't force it.

And yet you would think if that were the case, then probably the foolish thing to do, the most foolish thing to do would be just that, to try to force time to bend to our will. It is foolish, but you're probably not surprised to learn that people do this all the time.

And verse five and six, again, asks us to consider that in even greater depth. Also the sun rises and the sun sets and hastening to its place, it rises there again, blowing toward the South, then turning toward the North.

Time works and dances so beautifully with creation. There are wind circuits, rivers that flow into seas, all of these various things. And again, without ever wondering, what does Ilya think about all of that?

It just continues. You age whether you like it or not. And that's measured by so many rotations around the sun, all of these various things, again, standing so beyond us. Surely man would not be so foolish as to try to get in its way.

Well, indeed he has. During the French Revolution, they attempted to go into a 10-day week because seven is admittedly a little awkward. Surely 10 days is more natural. It was the revolution not only against the king, but against the church.

We're unshackling ourselves from the superstitions of old. Finally, we can have a course of time that actually goes against what we think is more realistic. I don't know when the last time you were in France, but they are back to a seven-day week.

They have been for centuries. Because isn't it so interesting that we could just create a 10-day week calendar and try to live by that, but apparently it doesn't work. The seven-day week is so hardwired into man because that's how God created everything, that even that is almost impossible to get away from.

The wind continues swirling along, verse six, and on its circular courses, the wind returns. There is a natural order to things. And one of the core elements of that is time. And we can't do anything about that.

But these problems, they keep coming back. This attempt to try to master time, again, might sound so foolish, but the more you think about it, the clearer it becomes. It's absolutely everywhere. That's why verses nine and 10 tell us that that which is done is what will be done.

These foolish things, they keep coming back. And there is nothing new under the sun, as the verse continues. Is there anything of which one might say, see, this, it is new. Already it has existed for ages which were before us.

We looked at Cain killing his brother. Is murder a new thing? Is violent crime a new thing? Now, you could say that, well, surely, some things can be new. Cain killed his brother. That was the first instance of violent murder.

Some things can be, in some sense, categorically new. But as we've already seen, the spirit behind it is the same. Another example that's been so prominent lately is a gentleman named Brian Johnson. You might've heard of him.

He was a businessman that made a lot of money in the tax sector, and in so doing, he was a lapsed Mormon. And during his business career, he very much damaged his health because long days, long nights, terrible eating, all the rest of it.

And so he sold his company for an incredible sum of money. Now he has all this money that he sits on. Remember Luke 12. And he tells himself, I'm going to now improve my health. So he started eating better and sleeping more and sleeping better and all the rest of it and working out, and some of us are thinking, yeah, I should probably do that.

And that was fine insofar as it went. In fact, it was kind of an interesting sort of philanthropic project because he even then put all of his data online for you to be able to copy that if you wanted to.

He hired a whole litany of doctors that are on a $2 million a year payroll to measure every single thing all the time. He is, quote unquote, the most measured man on earth. And what started as simply, and admittedly, he looks better and he looks more healthy and there's probably some value in what he's doing.

But what started off as being able to lift a suitcase on an airplane by myself at the age of 100, then going on to, I want to live to 120, I want to live to 150, 200, and now he has openly started talking about the possibility, the real possibility of immortality despite the fact that he knows that he has a terminal condition with his stomach.

His brand is don't die. And he's not being cheeky about it. He really believes it. So much so that he has said, if man can beat death, it'll be the greatest thing we've ever done. Thankfully, a bunch of Christians went into the comments and they said, who's gonna tell him?

Is it really the case that we cannot understand him? That we have no idea what he's on about? In the weakness of our flesh, don't we want to live forever? Don't we want to be healthy forever? Don't we want everything to be perfect?

Don't we want to master time and have control over it? That's not what scripture teaches. We don't have that option. And indeed, we were promised that death is a result of the fall. And you do have a limited amount of time here on earth.

Some more, some less. Scripture instead teaches us to number our days because the days are evil. And all of that on its own would be futility and vanity, were it not for the fact that God has also redeemed time for us.

And a Christian, therefore, can have a redeemed attitude and relationship toward time. Isaiah chapter 66, that final chapter tells us that from Sabbath to Sabbath, God's people will come before him. So then as a Christian, are you a Sabbath to Sabbath person?

That seven days is not just hardwired into creation because God had nothing better to do. It's because there is one day that has been set aside for the glory of God and for the building up of his people.

And is church something that you carve out some time for because there's all this other important stuff? Or is this the most important time of your week? Is this the day upon which everything else has to be based?

Everything else is scheduled around the fact that Sunday worship, that Lord's Day worship is a foretaste of the perfect eternal Sabbath that I'm going to enjoy with my creator because I am not the master of time, but the master of time has brought me in, has given me meaning and purpose, and more than that, has given me himself.

That's what man against time would look like when everything is ordered and proper. And we conclude with man against creation. Man can exercise some amount of lordship over his work. We saw that. Over time, not really.

Human Limits Before Creation and the Glory of God

Over creation, less still, and yet we try. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full, verse seven says. Despite that fact, creation is the arena where we often feel like we have the upper hand and where we can feel very accomplished.