Eat, Drink, Be Merry, and Want

Today is better, if better is measured against an empty, made bed. I didn’t have to leave it this morning and I sure didn’t have to pull the comforter smooth and set the pillows upright, but I did, and that’s how today’s better than the rest of the days lately. I don’t have depression, and depression doesn’t have me, though September so far would verify the symptoms. And listen, I’m no stranger to shivers of melancholy, heaviness, lethargy, and dread. They’re there in the morning, dare I say normal, but they don’t scare me.

Typically, I’ll have a moment to write my thoughts or hum a little tune or breathe in deeply a drink of cool air to remind me again that I am not how I feel. How I feel certainly matters but so does the spirit of a sound mind, so can we do something with the bunch – turn them to beauty, meaning, surge them with purpose. This one goes here, that one there. Most of my days, I’m able to contextualize the emotions, process them rightly and at the end of a night hand them back. But some days – the troubling ones – they’ve spun a web so wide with every dead thing stuck to it, that at the end of a night you lie there and know it’s a part of you now and way too much to hand back.

Days turn to weeks and three weeks to a month until your alarm goes off again and you wonder if this is the time it stays. For a small second, I feel guilty because, to the naked eye, only severe misfortune could warrant this kind of a breakdown. An unfathomable well of tears. And if not that, stoic. And if not that, asleep. Not a lack of motivation but the total absence of it. Motionless, stuck, inarticulably lost. But I harness my guilt, because I start to realize I haven’t got anywhere for this to go, not even if I tried. And I’ve tried!

Before, I’ve pinned what pains me to loss, chocked it up to change or something hard at home – grasping at straws to attach the feeling to its reason. I think we do that, you and me both. The mirage of control tempts us to the notion that we’re capable of simplifying our suffering. Explaining it, interpreting it, accounting for it. But this. Call it humbling if you want, or sanctifying even, though I’m admittedly not far enough out of it to say so. This has escaped my body, it’s detached from all reason, making me an incoherent piece of flesh, rendered useless when asked to give it a name.

On a good day, monotony excites me. The unremarkable stems of laundry, dishes, work and bills weaving their ways into the impressive garden of life. Errands and chores keeping company with stars. But the past few weeks, I’ve been dead-legged by the trivial pursuit of such things. Perhaps they really did all feel too hard to bear, or maybe again I’d try and link my sensibilities to the closest tangible goat. I’m not one to fuss much over finances, but our bank statement took me out for a full day. I truly and faithfully enjoy the routine of work, but shortness of breath would catch me on my way in and then I’d leave, demoralized. After delighting in the gift of my husband in bed, I’d peel my skin away from his and cry. “I’m tired, and I’m just so sad.” Fine, ordinary things that are easy for me to reconcile were carving me emptier. 

I used the word suffocated. Ryan, seeking to understand, said, “I think I know what you mean. You feel like you’re trapped in a jar, restless, and you need to break out. To do something else.” And I’m glad he said that, used that analogy, because it allowed me the chance to say, “No, the opposite! I feel claustrophobic in the sense that I can’t take any more demands. I’m just breathing but barely. I don’t need to do anything, in fact, I want to do nothing. I feel like a slave to the world, and when will it stop. This is not the life that is good for me.”

My friends sat on my left and right and held my hands as I fumbled my way through it, fragile as can be. One let me finish and said, “This will sound cliché, and I’m sorry for that, but when was the last time you were in the Word?” I wouldn’t have let more than maybe five people in my life ask me that, but she knew she’d been given the authority to do so kindly. My lips quivered and alligator tears came. Not because I was ashamed in my answer or embarrassed to really say. But literally because even those words were too big. The Word swallowed me. It sure didn’t seem like the way and the truth and the life. If it was living water to some, I was the unlucky ‘oh, you of little faith’ who drowned in it. And when my prayers were selfish and few that night, thank God for the gift of theirs.

Ryan sat on the couch the other day and out of the presumable blue told me that he was going to have a go at Ecclesiastes. There’s a season for everything, mourning and dancing, we all know – but I couldn’t remember the last time I had read through the whole book. It seems I’d tucked it away, the short little thing, and thought that I had known it and nailed it for good. But I figured, I’ll do it too, and at least this is a start. I sat for two hours on the car dealership’s Wi-Fi and chewed it all, 1-12, astounded. The words came off the pages of the book that I had prematurely nailed for good and resuscitated me.

“The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem: ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’ What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”

What a comfort to know that the words of this Preacher were echoing mine. The total absurdity of life gnawing at us until we can point to the intention of more. He goes on to talk about the vanity of riches, toil and pleasure. Things like bills, work, and sex. “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.” It’s all hevel, the Hebrew word, meaning vapor or smoke. All things are wearisome, more than one can say.

The Bible Project talks about the myth of religious fulfillment, the pattern of thinking that says, “I’m going to invite God into my life to enhance my life, to make it better, solve my problems so that I’ll be a happier, more successful person. We may not be very explicit about it but the driving motive behind it is I do this God, Jesus thing so that my life is enhanced as a result of it.”

Tim Mackie, in his Exploring My Strange Bible podcast, says that, “What if we just have the wrong set of expectations altogether? What if God’s promise to me under the sun, by which he means in this broken world compromised by evil, compromised by sin, what if God’s promise to me is actually not to solve all my problems? What if that was never His promise to me? What if His promise to me was actually not that my life may go better and that all of my dreams may come true? What if His promise to me, which is later revealed in the process, is that God actually enters into the hevel of human existence and takes it into Himself on the cross? And what if you and I are left in the position of great humility, where even though I may not be able to grasp what the meaning of life is, am I going to presume to say, therefore, life has no meaning because I can’t figure out what it is? Just because I can’t see the sense or the meaning, it does not mean that there’s no sense.”

In the weeks leading up to now, I’ve been ultra sensitive to fluttery language that we’ve somehow twisted and attributed to scripture over the years. Encouraging speech under the guise of biblical promise, like ‘God won’t ever give us more than we can handle’. Certainly taken from 1 Corinthians 10:13 where Paul assures the Corinthians that “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” The distinction is that temptation has always been present after the fall, and He is our escape. He’s not “up there” sprinkling down on us trials until the scale starts to tip. Stacking brick after brick in our hands until it’s up to our ears and our knees are just at buckling and then he graciously gives reprieve — no. That’s the myth of religious fulfillment, and Ecclesiastes challenges it. We will be given far more than we can handle, far more than our souls can bear (some souls choose not to bear it), but the revelation of His coming is our endurance, our escape.

Another of my favorites: “This too shall pass,” a Persian adage not found in scripture. We, some of us, say it as a quick fix during suffering, contorting the narrative to make Christ fit it the way we want. But that’s sloppy, and we should choose our words carefully here, especially in the hopes to be helpful. Why else do we trust Him if not to relieve us of our painful duties? We trust Him because this is what He started, and we don’t really get a say. Because friends, it might not pass. It hasn’t for some, and it surely isn’t promised to. But what if He’s still our comfort as we’re being renewed? “So that we may be able to endure it.” And keep on rejoicing.

We should count it joy that we can eat, drink and be merry and still wake up wanting. Empty, unfulfilled, bored, and burdensome. The meaninglessness of our efforts, endeavors, ultimately stirs up a deep yearning for transcendence that does not go away, and praise God for that. Man cannot work it out on his own, and there’s always a fly in the ointment when we try. Mackie says, “Ecclesiastes is human self-sufficiency stretched to its absolute limit and found sadly wanting. He’s asking questions that can be answered only by a future revelation of God. And clearing the road for this revelation, he smashes any and all false hopes to pieces.”

From glory to glory, he’s taking us. One day delighting in the gift of our Father who’s made sense of us, set it from crooked to straight. Everything under the sun will all be passed, and we’ll turn to Him and praise him that we don’t feel tired and we’re no longer sad.