What’s the point? - Ecclesiastes 1
Read: Ecclesiastes 1
Listen: A Song - “Vapor” by The Liturgists
Listen: A Meditation – “Vapor Meditation” by The Liturgists
There have been many times over the past dozen years where I have asked myself, “What’s the point?” Why am I working so hard for so little return? Why do I invest so much in others when they do not change? Nothing really changes. Bad things still happen. Life is hard and basically stinks. So, what is the point of any of it? “It,” in this case, referring to any and all aspects of life.
I have screamed this question in the silence of my own mind. I have asked this question of others with a sigh of defeat. I have cried this question to God hoping for a lightning bolt answer from the sky.
Qoheleth, the Preacher, asks this question more eloquently in Ecclesiastes 1: “What does a person gain for all his efforts that he labors at under the sun?” Thus begins a book that has been called unsettling and strange. Ecclesiastes falls under the wisdom literature category along with Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Job. Ultimately, this book asks, and seeks to answer, “what is the purpose of life?” Where the Psalms teach us that we can bring our full range of emotions and spill them out to God, Ecclesiastes teaches us that we can ask God the hard, ugly, and dare I say – shameful – questions. We get to bring Him our why questions. We get to ask Him, “What’s the point?”
God is not afraid of our questions, so we do not need to be scared or ashamed of the questions we have.
For as long as humans have been around, we have been asking questions. And anyone who interacts with a toddler knows that questions are their main form of communication – “Why?” being the favorite word of many a child. I do not think that this question solely belongs to toddlers though. As we grow older, I think we stuff our questions down more often than not. We do not indulge our curiosity as much as we could. We may be afraid of asking the questions, but we may also be afraid of the answers that await us.
In Ecclesiastes, the Preacher determines to find an answer to the purpose of life – an answer to his “what’s the point?” question. So, he “applied [his] mind to examine and explore through wisdom all that is done under heaven” (1:13). He concludes that everything is futile and “a pursuit of the wind” (1:14). The Preacher determines that anything we do in life is meaningless and pointless.
This is a conclusion I have reached myself in many of my darkest moments over the years.
Yet, this is not the end of the story. There are some missing pieces that have not been considered.
However, today, this is where I leave you. We will continue our journey through the strange, yet fascinating, book of Ecclesiastes over the next weeks, and we will seek the missing pieces that we need to fully answer the question “what’s the point?” Life does not need to be futile and meaningless, so stick with me on this journey through Ecclesiastes as we puzzle out our answers together.
