The Cartographer Who Burned His Maps

In 1947, a retired cartographer named Edwin Hargreaves sat in his cluttered study in Bath, England, surrounded by forty years of hand-drawn maps. He had charted rivers in Burma, sketched coastlines along the Adriatic, and plotted mountain passes through the Swiss Alps. Every map was meticulous, beautiful, and — by his own admission — ultimately incomplete. There was always another ridge he had missed, another tributary unnamed.

On his seventy-third birthday, Edwin gathered his journals and wrote a single line on the last page: "I have measured the world and found it unmeasurable. The only coordinates that hold are these — reverence and obedience."

His granddaughter later recalled that Edwin spent his final years not mapping new terrain but walking the same half-mile path to St. Michael's Church each morning. He had stopped trying to chart everything. He had found his fixed point.

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes understood this journey intimately. He had chased wisdom, pleasure, wealth, and legacy — mapping every avenue the world offers — and arrived at the same conclusion Edwin scrawled in his journal. After twelve chapters of searching "under the sun," he sets down his pen and speaks plainly: "Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man."

All our restless charting leads to one quiet destination. The fear of the Almighty is not the beginning of another search. It is the end of every one.