Ecclesiastes is like a wise and strange sherpa. The book is full of wisdom and can guide you up the mountain of life. But you don’t turn to the pages of Ecclesiastes if you want to find an easy path. It offers no easy answers. The book is more like poetry than math. It’s not trying to make everything add up. If we want to take a long hard look at life—not as it might be for you in this moment, or how you think it should be—Ecclesiastes shows us life as it really is: messy, hard to grasp, and tragic. Yet still beautiful—a gift that can surprise us with joy.