Vanity of Vanities

Ecclesiastes opens with despair: everything is vanity, meaningless, futility. The Preacher has pursued wisdom, pleasure, achievement - and found all of it empty. 'What does anyone gain from all their labor at which they toil under the sun?'

This is not the typical Christian message. We're usually encouraged toward productivity, toward goal-setting, toward making our lives matter. But Ecclesiastes asks: does it? Does anything we do actually matter in the end?

I was burned out from years of striving, and I picked up Ecclesiastes not for comfort but for permission to stop. And what I found was surprising - the Preacher's despair isn't nihilism. It's realism. He's saying: yes, your achievements are temporary. Yes, you will die. Yes, none of it lasts. And then, having established that, he can talk about what's actually valuable. It's a clearing away before rebuilding. I needed that.