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Have you ever imagined attending your own funeral?

You watch the story of your life unfold before your eyes — the words you spoke, the love you gave (or withheld), the time you wasted scrolling, the moments you never fully enjoyed. You see your family, your friends, your coworkers — and you wonder what they’ll remember most. Will they remember your kindness, your faith, your love for God? Or will they remember how distracted, busy, and self-focused you often were?

That’s the unsettling yet freeing perspective Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes 11:7–12:8. He invites us to live not forward — chasing the next milestone — but backward, starting with the end in mind. Because the only way to live life well is to remember where it’s headed.

Author David Gibson puts it this way:

"Ecclesiastes teaches us to live life backward. It encourages us to take the one thing in the future that is certain—our death—and work backward from that point into all the details and decisions and heartaches of our lives, and to think about them from the perspective of the end.”

In this passage, Solomon gives us two keys to living backward:

  1. Consider Your Mortality

  2. Chase After Joy

1. Consider Your Mortality

Solomon paints a vivid picture of aging in chapter 12 — trembling hands, weak knees, dim eyes, and gray hair. He’s not being morbid; he’s being merciful. He’s reminding us that death is certain, and pretending otherwise only leads to folly.

You can fight aging with fitness routines, hair dye, or surgery — but you can’t stop it. The “evil days” will come for all of us. The question is: Are you ready?

How we live now will shape how we die later. As J.R. Miller once wrote,

“Old age is the harvest of all the years that have gone before. We are each, in all our earlier years, building the house in which we shall have to live when we grow old.”

So, what kind of house are you building? Are you preparing for eternity, or pretending it’s not coming?

2. Chase After Joy

Solomon also tells us to rejoice in every day God gives. “Light is sweet,” he says, “and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.” (Eccl. 11:7) Life is a gift — and the right response to a gift is joy.

God actually commands us to enjoy life! “Rejoice, O young man, in your youth,” Solomon writes. Not because youth lasts forever, but because it doesn’t. Every sunrise, every laugh, every meal shared with someone you love — it’s all a reminder of God’s goodness.

C.S. Lewis once said,

“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us… We are far too easily pleased.”

True joy doesn’t ignore the end — it learns to rejoice in the light while it lasts and trust the God who rules the darkness.

Living Backward in a Forward-Driven World

Our culture tells us to live for the moment, to chase what’s new, to ignore death until it’s knocking on the door. But Solomon reminds us: Life is lived best when we start at the end.

When you live backward — remembering your Creator now, before the “evil days” come — you’ll start to see life differently. You’ll treasure people over possessions, purpose over comfort, and eternity over ease. You’ll realize that joy isn’t found in ignoring death but in living every day in light of it.

So, before the silver cord is snapped and the golden bowl is broken, remember your Creator. Rejoice in His gifts. And live every day backward — because that’s how life was meant to be lived.