If you take someone who struggles with anxiety and a chronic need for control, add in a pandemic, and you end up with me for the last year.
My family moved from America to Australia in June of 2019. After a rough 8 months of grieving, I was just starting to feel somewhat at home, going to Avondale College and beginning to make friends.
Then, the pandemic struck, and I found the fragile world I was building for myself locking down around me as the world ceased to exist as we knew it. In addition to all of this, my family was between houses given our recent international move. All this resulted in me grasping at whatever straws of control I could find. I spent hours a day on Sydney Morning Herald waiting on tenterhooks for the daily updates, or researching when a vaccine might be available.
As an analytical person, when faced with a problem I tend to attack it from as many angles as I can until I’ve solved it. Yet here was a problem that no matter what I did, I couldn’t solve. When I finally started to accept this, I joined much of the rest of the world in counting the days until 2020 would be over. That is until I started reading the book of Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes has a rather morbid reputation, what with all the dramatic cries of “meaningless, oh meaningless, everything is MEANINGLESS!”. As a result, I had steered clear of it until October of this year.
To my surprise, Ecclesiastes was far from depressing, rather, the opposite. Its calming words helped me to realize that all the things I get stressed out about, whether that be COVID-19, global warming, or whether or not Trump would get re-elected, in the long run, don’t matter.
It was as if Solomon was whispering from the past “it’s okay, you can let it go. You don’t have to stress about it. It doesn’t matter.” Ecclesiastes 5: 18-20 especially stood out to me. It reads,
“This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labour under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot. Moreover, when God gives someone wealth and possessions, and the ability to enjoy them, to accept their lot and be happy in their toil—this is a gift of God. They seldom reflect on the days of their life, because God keeps them occupied with gladness of heart.”
This verse made me realize a few things. First, God has given me so many gifts. I may not be Jeff Bezos in terms of money, but I have enough. God has blessed me with so much non-material wealth, like my loving family, a house that feels like home, and a kitten who insists on sleeping on my face early in the morning. This passage made me realize that I don’t have to continue living with the existential dread that has defined so much of 2020. That if I focus on my “toilsome labour under the sun” (in my case, coursework for Avondale), and all the wonderful things that are in my life, I’ll be too “occupied with gladness of heart” to be stressed about things out of my control.
If Ecclesiastes has taught me anything, it’s that life sucks sometimes. Bad things will continue to happen. And when life feels out of control (which it will), we should dwell on the things that bring us joy.
In addition, as Christians, we have the hope that someday, Jesus will come back and make everything wrong in the world right again. Stressful things don’t matter nearly as much as we think they do. Breathe. It’s okay to let it go and let God deal with it.
WRITER: Caitlin Jankiewicz