Investing in Vapor and The Shrewdness of Smoke—What is Your Vapor?

You have 72 hours to prepare for a critical task. What do you do?

I faced this exact scenario recently. Our pastor was away, and with only three days' notice, I was asked to cover an evening service. The normal response would be panic—a frantic scramble to assemble something coherent. But what happened was the opposite. I felt a strange sense of calm as God began to orchestrate the entire lesson, not just for the congregation, but first, for me.

The process became a live demonstration of the very message I was preparing to share: a lesson about recognizing the fleeting nature of our world and using that understanding not as a source of despair, but as the ultimate strategic advantage.

The Problem of Vapor

It started with a concept from an ancient teacher in Ecclesiastes, a man who looked at all of human toil—the empires, the art, the relentless work—and summed it up with a single, startling word: Havel. The word is often translated as 'vanity' or 'meaningless', but its true sense is more like 'vapor' or 'smoke'. It's like your breath on a cold morning; it's real for a moment, and then it's gone.

This teacher wasn't saying life is useless; he was saying it's temporary. You can see it, but you can't hold on to it. Think about the things that weigh you down. Your job? That's vapor. Your apartment, your student loans, your ambitions? All vapor. This isn't just ancient poetry; it's a cosmic reality. When the Voyager spacecraft looked back at Earth from the edge of our solar system, our entire world was just a "pale blue dot," what the scientist Carl Sagan called "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." On that tiny speck lived every king and peasant, every saint and sinner, every joy and every sorrow in human history.

When you grasp this, you're faced with a choice. This truth can be absolutely depressing, or it can be absolutely freeing. It frees you from the crushing weight of trying to win a temporary game.

The Shrewd Strategy

If everything is vapor, what then should we do? Jesus answers this with a strange and brilliant story: the Parable of the Shrewd Manager. A manager is about to be fired for wasting his master's resources. He's in a crisis. He knows his position and power are temporary. The timeline is short, much like the three days I had to prepare.

So, what does he do? He acts. Decisively. He uses the final moments of his authority to slash the debts of his master's clients, securing their goodwill for his own future.

And here’s the twist: his boss finds out and commends him. Not for his dishonesty, but for his shrewdness. The manager saw his time was limited and used his temporary power to create a permanent advantage for himself.

This is where it all clicked for me. Jesus looks at his followers and says, "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light." He's issuing a challenge: If worldly people are so brilliant at using temporary things to get more temporary things, why aren't we, as people of faith, just as clever with our temporary treasures to gain an eternal reward?

Investing the Vapor

The "unrighteous mammon" Jesus talks about is the vapor. It's your time, your money, your skills, your energy—all the temporary resources you manage. The strategy He gives us is simple: convert the vapor. Use these fleeting resources with radical generosity to invest in things that are not vapor—people.

Every time you use a temporary resource to show love to an eternal soul, you are converting vapor into lasting value. Your management of the vapor becomes a test, revealing who you truly serve. As Jesus said, "Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

The lesson I was pulled to teach, taught me first. That tight deadline wasn't a punishment; it was a practical demonstration. It forced me to act, to take the first step without having the entire staircase in view. And what I found was that the moment I took that step, God was already there, making sure solid ground was beneath my feet.

He's already prepared the provision. Our hesitation is often the only thing blocking His power. We can act fast for Him precisely because we can trust that He does not fail. He simply calls us to act, knowing that our fleeting moments, when invested shrewdly for eternity, are anything but meaningless.