“ENOUGH”
One of the (many) things that has been helpful to see in the book Ecclesiastes is the author continually “demolish” things we seek to build our lives around that won’t last or satisfy in order to “re-build” our lives around God who endures forever (3:14)
Jeremy reminded us of this when talking about chapter 2:1
(I said in my heart, Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself).
“We have all tried this in our own lives. We have tried our hardest to enjoy ourselves. How did it go? Largely we enjoy ourselves, but once the joy has passed…we are the same as before: feeling the need for enjoyment again. It is renewable but not sustaining.”
In other words, “it’s never enough”. I have been reading a helpful book – Seculosity – alongside Ecclesiastes that I am going to be sharing snippets of throughout the series. The book unpacks different areas of life that have become our cultures new “religion”. Areas where we seek to find meaning and purpose and t0 makes us feel like we are “enough”:
“Listen carefully and you’ll hear the word enough everywhere, especially when it comes to anxiety, loneliness, exhaustion, and division that plague our moment to such tragic proportions. You’ll hear about people scrambling to to be successful enough, happy enough, thin enough, wealthy enough, influential enough, desired enough, woke enough, good enough. We believe instinctively that, were we to reach some benchmark in our minds, then value, vindication, and love would be ours—that if we got enough, we would be enough. But here’s the wrinkle….no matter how close we get or how much we achieve, we never quite arrive at enough.” (Seculosity, p. xiv)
The good news of the gospel, is that in Christ, we are ENOUGH. We are fully vindicated (for all the ways we aren’t enough), valued and loved. When we rest in that good news, we don’t have to keep striving to “be enough” and we find freedom from the anxiety, loneliness, exhaustion and division that comes along with it.
What is an area of life that you causes you to feel anxious, lonely and exhausted where you might be striving to be enough?