Why Is Popularity Like Chasing the Wind?

I love speaking in front of hundreds of people. Sometimes I can hear a pin drop. Oftentimes I share shenanigans that are uniquely mine (or the escapades of those I’ve walked with instead). Before I know it, my own chest often echoes with laughter over the microphone, as I share a story with whimsy.

My hope is that the laughter will spill out and multiply, from my place on stage, to the many listeners watching me from their seats. Sometimes these stories have a contagion of tears instead, if the moral of my story is poignant and especially hard-won. 

This connection between preacher and community has a unique intimacy—though, if I’m honest, a simultaneous vulnerability lurks around every sentence unfurled from my mouth as well. On days when I have spoken five times in one day, to multiple congregations, people falsely assume I’ll feel the message getting stale and insincere. However, the opposite is actually true for me! If I meant it the first time, I mean it all the more the fifth time the words are unleashed. They ring out with more fervency and/or delight. Not less.

Sharing my heart, my life, and my discoveries from God’s word gives me a feeling of abundance that is hard to fully express. I speak not as a self-professed expert, but as a fellow explorer, stopped in my tracks for a bit, with the mystery and wonder of this wild life starkly begging me to behold it with others. I work to share authentically and not sugarcoat the difficult stuff. Some days I do this better than others.

On the days when the message lands, multiple people might give me encouraging feedback. In my humanness, that can make the hours of painstaking prayer and preparation feel more worth it. But this isn’t promised to me either. Some messages include things that even I wasn’t ready to feel or to hear from God. So “pleasing” clearly isn’t always the point. 

There are many ways we public leaders can be graded in our ministry and in our craft. This truth isn’t limited to pastors. All humans understand the feeling of being watched or judged, regardless of our life situation. Some opinions people speak over us can serve as excellent measures of faithfulness to what God has us on this earth to do. Yet some comments or judgments can represent counterfeit popularity or people-pleasing. 

The Fickleness of Human Approval

If you’re honest, no matter your job or life calling, at the time you are reading this, you might get distracted by trying to please others with your ability or your likeability. Before you know it, your eyes might drift from what actually matters. You might struggle with giving your devotion to the ever-shifting opinions of those around you. The crux of it is that these opinions aren’t a steady guardrail to hold onto.

Some seasons this is especially true because it feels like God has you scaling heights that require you to be tethered to the one opinion that actually matters—the giver of wisdom himself. This is your biggest lifeline. The thing that will hold you when nothing else (or no one else) does. I wish I didn’t know that to be true. But I do.

Getting others' approval is like trying to catch something that disappears into thin air. The wisdom writer of Ecclesiastes picks up this theme in chapter 4. I encourage you to chew on these words a few times and think to yourself: how does people-pleasing (or the idol of image management) show up in your own story today?

It is better to be a poor but wise youth than an old and foolish king who refuses all advice. Such a youth could rise from poverty and succeed. He might even become king, though he has been in prison. But then everyone rushes to the side of yet another youth who replaces him. Endless crowds stand around him, but then another generation grows up and rejects him, too. So it is all meaningless—like chasing the wind. Ecclesiastes 4:13-16

It seems the shifting tides of approval may well make a foolish man king for a while. This might tempt us to be like the king—hoping for power, wealth, or trying to impress others in some counterfeit way. But it doesn’t last. It’s like catching wind. Impossible. Whether we realize it or not, it will eventually show itself as the utter waste of energy it actually is! We might climb the heights of popularity and then ultimately lose it all, with nothing to show for it. The fads and fancies of people around us are as fickle as the evening mist. Do not be fooled! It is here today, gone tomorrow. 

Learning to Listen for Wisdom

This passage also suggests something else equally important. The one who looks unimpressive and like a failure of sorts may well have a wonderful new chapter of God’s good awaiting them! The youthful one starts out clearly poor and imprisoned—seemingly stuck in low expectations and demise. But our passage doesn’t leave us there. A promise of new possibility emerges, if we dare to live teachable and willing to learn something new.

What would new possibility look like in your life? How can you be schooled by wisdom in this season? Holding onto the need for approval can, at times, be like fool’s gold: shiny, but with value that doesn’t match our investment. Maybe God’s timing is worth the wait, even when we feel like we’re not on the winning side of life. Maybe winning isn’t the point after all. 

What if the approval of others was never meant to be the currency we were meant to pine after? What if there’s an altogether different way to show up in this finicky world? Perhaps this wild wisdom turns things upside down. Let’s dare to tune our ears to the sound of wisdom’s voice as we wait for what God has for us, after the approval of those around us proves to be a counterfeit crown.