God gives meaning to the meaningless

  This morning, my pastor was preaching out of Ecclesiastes 2. One of his final points, amidst Solomon proclaiming everything to be meaningless, was "God gives meaning to the meaningless."
  I put forth one Tony Nolan. His mother was a mentally insane prostitute, had no father. He was adopted out of the orphanage he was placed in, and abused by his adopted parents. Tony literally had no future - until he found God. Now, he's an accomplished writer and speaker - and has a very powerful testimony.
  My next piece of evidence is Peter, James, and John. Three poor, ordinary fishermen. Day after day they would go out onto the Sea of Galilee, catch fish. Eat what they needed in order to live and sell the rest - if there was any left. Then, Jesus came along. Three years later, they were leaders in the church - Peter even (according to tradition) founded the Catholic Church. Pretty hard to make more of an impact than that, huh?
  Even Jesus was born into a poor family, in a region that was actually referred to with scorn by the rest of Israel at the time. People back then would say (with the appropriate scorn in their voices), "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" No one expected the son of a carpenter from Nazareth to be the Messiah.
  Now, to bring it back to Solomon: he experienced all the worldly things that are supposed to bring pleasure, and experienced them much more fully than most people have the opportunity to. At the end, he said it was all meaningless, and like chasing the wind. However, the things he said were meaningless are only meaningless apart from God. If you amass wealth for yourself, what's the point? You'll die, and somebody else will get control of the money. But God can take that money, and use it to bring eternal good to others, and to bring Himself glory.
  Solomon also tried sex, and apparently lots of it. Which you can do, when you're the richest guy in the world and have 300 concubines and 700 wives. Having 1000 women willing to sleep with him, he still said it was meaningless. But God can take sex - within the proper confines of marriage - and turn it into something beautiful that brings the husband and wife closer to each other and God.
  For those of you who don't know, Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. However, perhaps most surprisingly, he said that even wisdom was meaningless, since both the wise man and the fool will eventually die and be forgotten. But God can take a person's wisdom and use it to impact the world forever. Look at Descartes, or Newton - two very famous people, one in the field of philosophy ("I think therefore I am") and one in the sciences, and both were devout Christians. In fact, Descartes' famous statement is only the very beginning of a philosophical proof of the existence of God; and Newton wrote more theology than he did math or science.
  God has always worked in the small things, in the people who were (or thought they were) meaningless. Just because we think we're normal doesn't mean God doesn't have a purpose for us. Don't ever think that you're meaningless, because God gives you meaning.