This is the one good thing I’ve seen: it’s appropriate for people to eat, drink, and find enjoyment in all their hard work under the sun during the brief lifetime that God gives them because that’s their lot in life. (Ecclesiastes 5:18, CEB)
I only know a few people who claim the book of Ecclesiastes as their favorite book of the Bible. It’s no surprise why many don’t like it. In fact, I would guess that not many people have read all of it. It goes down like a cup of hot water on a warm, summer day. The opening line of its main speaker: “Perfectly pointless . . . , perfectly pointless. Everything is perfectly pointless.” It demands Elliott Smith as its soundtrack: “Go off to sleep in the sunshine; I don’t want to see the day when it’s dying.” Most of us don’t want to hear that crap. We want to be comforted in our challenges. We face adversity, in many forms, every day. What can be said to me to remind me that everything’s going to be alright?
But sometimes a voice that challenges the comforted is needed to wake us from our sleep. In the U.S. in the twenty-first century, the word of Ecclesiastes couldn’t be more poignant. “Life is brief; almost everything you think is important isn’t, and doing those things causes you to miss the only things worthwhile.” We Americans waste our lives pursuing emptiness. And it only costs us everything to get it.
Another voice right at home with Smith and Ecclesiastes is Kurt Vonnegut. He once said, “Enjoy the little things in life, because one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.”