Enjoying It Feels Like Giving Up

You cannot enjoy today and there is a reason, and it is not depression.

The reason is that enjoyment reads as agreement. If you sit down and genuinely enjoy the afternoon, some part of you registers that as accepting the current situation, and accepting the current situation feels like giving up on the thing you are supposed to still be working toward.

So enjoyment has been quietly reclassified as a concession. Something you would be allowed after, and taking it before would be a kind of cheating, or worse, a kind of surrender.

And so you have not had an unguarded afternoon in years. You have had time off. You have not had enjoyment, because you cannot let it all the way in without it meaning something.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have stayed at it for years, refusing yourself the afternoon the entire time, and you have gotten up every single time. Somebody who did not care would have enjoyed the afternoon long ago.

So this page will not tell you to accept yourself. That is the word that has been doing the damage.

I want to show you a verse where enjoyment is issued as an instruction, and see what it does to the arrangement.

Enjoyment is not agreement

Consider what the reclassification actually claims, said out loud, because nobody has ever said it out loud to you.

It claims that enjoying a day is a statement about the day. That pleasure taken in an afternoon is a vote cast in favor of everything currently true about your life, and therefore a withdrawal of the objection that has been lodged for decades.

That is not how anything works. Pleasure is not a ballot. A woman can genuinely enjoy a cup of coffee on a Tuesday and have exactly the same views about everything else at the end of it.

You have been treating pleasure as a vote, and no enjoyment has ever once been a statement about anything. Ecclesiastes 9:7 says go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes enjoyment arrive as an instruction rather than as a reward.

And notice what the arrangement has been protecting. It protects the objection. As long as you have not enjoyed anything, the objection is still lodged, still active, still on the record. Enjoyment would withdraw it, and withdrawing it feels like losing.

You have been keeping an objection alive at the cost of every afternoon, and no objection has ever once needed your misery to stay on the record. The written word issues eating and drinking with joy as a command, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a pleasure from a verdict in somebody who has never had them apart.

Eat thy bread with joy

The verse is startling because of who issues it and how plainly.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. (Ecclesiastes 9:7, King James Version)

Go thy way. Eat. With joy. Drink. With a merry heart.

Those are imperatives. This is not permission granted reluctantly. It is an instruction, in the same grammatical form as any other instruction in Scripture, and the content of it is enjoy your food.

You are under an instruction to enjoy something, and no enjoyment issued in that form has ever once been a concession. Ecclesiastes 9 gives the command plainly and does not attach conditions to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an imperative feel like one.

And read the reason given at the end. For God now accepteth thy works. Now. The acceptance is already in place, present tense, before the eating and the joy, which means the enjoying is downstream of an acceptance rather than a claim on one.

You have an acceptance that is already in place, and no joy of yours has ever once been a claim on something not yet granted. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a present tense acceptance land where a future one has been assumed, and the written word says for God now accepteth thy works.

Enjoy one thing on purpose

Now the part I came to say, and on purpose is the content.

Enjoy one ordinary thing today, deliberately. Not by accident, which is how the small amount of enjoyment in your life currently arrives and gets quickly withdrawn.

The coffee. A chapter of something. A while in a chair by a window. Whatever is ordinary and available and not an achievement.

And let it all the way in, which is the hard half, and say out loud afterward that enjoying it was not surrender.

You are able to let one thing all the way in, and no pleasure taken deliberately has ever once withdrawn anything. The written word commands eating with joy and gives an acceptance already in place as the reason, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes deliberate enjoyment possible for somebody who has only ever had accidental amounts of it.

And here is why on purpose matters more than what you choose. Accidental enjoyment can be disowned afterward. Deliberate enjoyment cannot, because you chose it, and the choosing is what makes it a fact rather than a slip.

You have a fact rather than a slip, and no deliberate thing has ever once been able to be disowned afterward. The Spirit of God is the one who makes one chosen pleasure stand, and Ecclesiastes 9:7 is the written word underneath it, where the eating and the joy are commanded and the acceptance is already given.