Have you ever dealt with despair? Maybe not in your own life, but maybe in the life of someone close. Or maybe you’ve at least tasted it a little in the writings of an existentialist or something of the sort. This sense that ultimately things are meaningless. A person is too small and everything is against them. What’s the point?
Some people see this as a modern problem, perhaps because modern people have a little extra time to ponder such things. In reality, this is not a modern problem. We can read stories of people struggling with meaninglessness across the ages, and even in the Bible. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time in Ecclesiastes but that’s where Yancey goes in his latest devotion. He said for a time he was bothered by Ecclesiastes and how it could sit there with a book like Proverbs. In Proverbs, you read all about how if you do what is right, if you follow wisdom, things will go right. In Ecclesiastes all is meaningless. Righteous men get what the wicked deserve and sometimes wicked men get what the righteous deserve. The writer of Ecclesiastes says, “see, it’s all meaningless”.
So what do we do with this disparity? As Yancey says, there is actually some comfort in the jarring differences in Scripture. The writers of the Bible know every place a person can be in life, from a sense that things are working out, but also the place where it all seems stacked against you. The important piece is to read it all together. The Bible never leaves us at despair, unlike some modern novels. The Bible takes a character like Job or David, and it brings them to the depths, where truly all seems to be lost, but it shows that even at that low point, God is with us. It speaks to us the truth that no suffering, no prosperity, nothing in our experience is meaningless, because it all is ultimately being worked towards God’s purpose.
And it’s ok to have those feelings of frustration. Wouldn’t we all like to know why things are happening from time to time? Good or bad. . . But God isn’t calling us to always know the purpose of these individual events, because he’s calling us to focus on what always gives us a greater purpose, living as his beloved children. And if that’s true, then nothing can ever really be meaningless. It’s all from God. It’s all part of the story he’s writing.
So even when we feel a little adrift, we can always look back to Scripture and that ultimate purpose to help us find direction in our world. And if we’re seeking after those bigger things, meaning can be imparted to all- from the daily grind, to our biggest dreams and goals.
