Well, let's, uh, porch, how are we doing tonight?

Hey, it's good to see you. Uh, welcome. So glad you made it. If this is your first Tuesday ever with us, thank you for trusting us with your Tuesday night.

Uh, I'm so glad that you are here. Uh, the porch really exists to help any and every young adult see Jesus and surrender fully to him. And I hope that that is true for you tonight.

I want to say hello to everyone watching online on all of our porch live locations. So I'm thinking about porch live Fort Worth watching tonight and porch live Tulsa, porch live Midland. Thank you for tuning in. Hope that all is well wherever you are.

So, uh, about four years ago, I got a phone call from my wife with some bad news. Now, let me preface and just say that I asked my wife if I could share this story. So check that box off.

She called me and said, Hey, uh, I hit a car in the parking lot of HEB in college station and she had hit, she had hit a parked car. And, uh, so I went up to HEB to the parking lot and it turns out that all of the parking spaces were slanted because, you know, it's only one way and it so all the spaces are slanted.

So, instead of reversing out of her space to leave the lot, she decided to pull through the open spot in front of her and turn right. Well, the problem was she cut it too short and she just totally caught the end of the car that was parked slanted. And so she cut it too close.

The entire back half of our minivan got crunched and then the back corner of the car that she hit just got mangled. The worst part about the story is the car that she hit was a Maserati.

And if you don't know anything about cars, she just hit the most expensive car in the parking lot and she did $7,500 worth of damage to that Maserati.

I tell you that because what my wife thought in the moment was this is a good path forward. Like this will work. It's not the right way to do things but it's a way that a lot of people do things.

And so I'm just going to pull forward in a way that I'm not supposed to but most people do it anyway. And it's not a big deal. And in the end, that choice which seemed like a small choice going the wrong way led to a lot of unnecessary pain.

And I tell you that because I wonder if I'm now not describing my wife hitting a Maserati. I wonder if I'm describing you because there can be this tendency in us to find our way to unnecessary pain.

I want to draw distinction tonight between unavoidable pain and unnecessary pain. Unavoidable pain is the pain that will normally and naturally come from living in a broken and busted world.

You will not have to go looking for this pain. It will just find you. And so there will be days and weeks and months that are very painful not because of anything you've done but simply because that is the reality of living in a broken and busted world.

Unnecessary pain on the other hand is 100% avoidable. It's 100% avoidable. Unnecessary pain comes from making what seems like small decisions to head in the wrong direction but you head that wrong direction because you look around and in everyone else is heading in a wrong direction.

That must make it a right direction. But in the end, it leads to unnecessary pain. This is a topic that I'm very passionate about because after I graduated from Texas A&M University, the two years post college that I was living in Dallas, I would say that I felt like I was living in Dallas.

That I found my way into significant unnecessary pain because I made a lot of compromising decisions that at the time seemed right because a lot of other people make decisions just like that.

But in the end, it was like pulling through a space and cutting the corner too tight and it was costly.

And if you're like, well, what does that even mean? Well, what I mean is I was actually working at this church and I had to confess sin to a staff of 50 or 60 people and I lost my job. I stepped off staff because I was living a life that was not congruent with what I proclaimed to believe.

My beliefs and my behavior didn't match. It was extremely costly. My life, I would say, hit rock bottom in a lot of ways. And so what I want to do tonight is I want to step back into the book of Ecclesiastes. I hope that you've enjoyed journeying through this book. What I hope Ecclesiastes has been for you is a pleasant surprise where you're like, I have spent zero time in Ecclesiastes.

And now that we've been studying it, I see just how relevant to our lives it is. Like Ecclesiastes chapter 10 is where we're going to be tonight. And I would say I can't think of a better chapter that is more relevant to the life of people in their mid 20s, late 20s, early 30s. This chapter is for you.

And we're learning from King Solomon who was in a lot of ways the richest and wisest person to really ever walk the face of the earth. And he's writing Ecclesiastes later in life. And so we're basically reading his journal entries as he looks back and just speaks from his experience.

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