everything is HEVEL; according to Qohelet.

Hi!

It’s been some time since I’ve been posting here! There’s numerous of reasons for this, but one of the most apparent is that I’ve just been very busy. That’s also why I had to be a bit more mindful with my time and things I say yes to. One of the first things that fell away was writing these little posts :))

What I’ve been up to.

The last few months I’ve been studying the book of Ecclesiastes (Prediker, Qohelet) a lot. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for quiet some time and when I heard we were gonna be studying it on a summer camp I was leading, I thought that I should take the chance. (Shout out Kunstenkamp)

It’s funny now that I think back to it. The last few months have been pretty unstable and literally felt quite empty, even though I finally got everything I seem to have wanted. It felt empty. I got my dream job, something that I’ve been working towards for years now, and still it felt empty. This is what Qohelet teaches us.

What is Qohelet?

The book of Ecclesiastes starts and ends with an introduction of the author who introduces a certain character: Qohelet. This comes from the Hebrew word Qahal which literally means to gather. Qohelet could loosely be translated to “he who gathers”. It is most often seen as a person that gathers people to teach. This means that the character wants his readers to gather around and listen carefully to what he has to say. It might be important and you could learn something from him.

Hevel?!

The second verse of Ecclesiastes might be one of the most known:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

Ecclesiastes 1:2 NIV

The word that’s being used here is Hevel. It’s used more than a 100 times in the whole book. Hevel is a word that has started to fascinate me quite a lot during my time of studying this book. It is something that feels like you can catch, but the moment you try, it flees. It’s like a vapour, it seems real, but you can’t catch it.

This word is also being used to describe to life of Qohelet. He says that he had everything he could’ve ever wanted. He was one of the richest men of his region and had everything he could’ve ever wanted. But still, it was never enough. Qohelet found out that everything he wanted, was never enough. He always wanted more.

Something else he found out is that time and life is something really fragile. He writes about it in the third chapter. He finds out that there’s a time for everything. A time for good things to happen, but also a time for bad things to happen. He finds out that the world isn’t perfect, and there’s nothing that we as mere humans can do about it.

He finds out that contrary to popular opinions, if you do good, you don’t always get goodness back. There’s injustice, pain and just a lot of hurt in this world. And there’s nothing we can do about it right now.

What now?

Luckily, there’s another thing he finds out and I think that this is one of the most beautiful things that I’ve also had the opportunity to experience the past few months.

Through it all, God is HERE! He is the constant, through all the pain; all the hurt and all the joy; all the happiness. This is the first clue of the book. Even though this world is imperfect, there’s beauty in exactly that. Because of that we get to experience real beauty.

When you slow down, and start acting with more intention, I have begun to notice more of the intricate little details, that make life so wonderfully made. And maybe it’s exactly that what Qohelet teaches us. There’s no amount of richness that will ever fulfil our hearts — and boy, did he try. Real peace is only found in the rest of our Creator.

Thanks for reading :))