“Nothing
like cooking on a freshly cleaned stove to make you contemplate the futility of
all human endeavors.” Some of you may recognize this as a Facebook status I
posted a while ago. It was a joke. But it was also deadly serious.
I could
blame it on the lockdown. Not seeing anyone in person has this way of making
relationships less satisfying. Or maybe I just have too much time to myself to
think.
On a
pretty regular basis lately, I’ve been feeling like everything is pointless. I
cook. I eat. I run out of food and need to cook again. I clean.
Dirt piles up. I exercise. It makes no discernible difference in my health,
unless I do it again and again and again. In the short term, the exercise might
even make me sore. And in the long term, I’m still going to die.
Yes, but
what about those things that only need to be done once? My knitting and
writing, for example. Each of these produces a thing that wasn’t there before.
But does the world really need another baby blanket? And my dissertation … will
be read by exactly four people in the form I’m working on right now. If I’m
lucky, I’ll publish it after significant revisions. Maybe someone will read it
in that form, too. Maybe someone will be convinced to look at the Bible closer
to the way I do. I think that will be a good thing? But my confidence in my
ability to come to the truth right now is very low.
And then
there are relationships. Normally, I tell myself that if I can make life better
for one other person, then my life counts. But is that happening? “Making life
better” is a vague goal, and it’s harder to convince myself I’m reaching it
when I can’t see people in person. My presence in a room feels significant in a
way that silently lurking on a zoom call isn’t. Talking on a zoom call feels
more like a contribution, but sometimes I don’t have anything to say. And in
the long term, other people are going to die, too.
Fun is …
fun. But it doesn’t really matter if I have fun. Work is always there
afterward. And does anyone other than me care if I enjoy myself? Maybe because
they’re kind, but not because it actually helps them in any way.
But
writing this has been somewhat artificial. I was feeling life’s pointlessness
at the beginning, but as I wrote, I kept thinking about other things. Things
that go beyond the futility I was describing. Like how making something that
wasn’t there before is me exercising the image of God. Like how other people
are made in the image of God, and that’s why improving their lives is a good
thing. Like how even though we’re all gonna die, that’s not the end of the
story.
I guess
what I’m writing is a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes. There is nothing new under
the sun, including this blog post. Ecclesiastes talks about life under the sun,
in a world without God. It concludes that everything is meaningless. But then,
the implication is, we must turn our eyes to something greater than the sun. We
live under heaven, under God, and that is what makes this life significant. We
do good things, even if we’re just going to have to do them again, because he
made us to do them. Our relationships matter because people are walking
pictures of God, and they’re going to exist forever. What we create is valuable
not because the world desperately needs another baby blanket or even another
dissertation, but because by making, we are acting out the image of our Maker,
and that brings Him pleasure(!). Even fun matters as we enjoy the good world He
made or good things made by his “sub-creators” (a term I shamelessly borrow
from Tolkien).
In some
ways, it’s good for us to “contemplate the futility of all human endeavors.” We
tend to make the good things in life more than they are, as though we can make
our own meaning. But that’s impossible, for meaning has to connect to something
outside of us to count as meaning. We need to be humbled, to recognize that
what we work for and worry about isn’t as big as it seems.
And yet,
right now, we also need to be elevated. We need to look up and see beyond the
sun to the heaven that makes our lives matter. We need this both for our own
sanity and because it helps us focus on what truly matters. Yes, fun is
valuable if received as a gift and rejoiced in, but using it to numb ourselves
to pain is a misuse of it. The same goes for work, and relationships and
everything else. We must relate them to the Creator for only in Him do they
find their meaning.
