If I had to use just one word to describe the mental and emotional stability of us OCD folks, I’d choose “precarious.” Our well-being can be as impermanent as our circumstances. We’re a house on shifting sand; a feather resting on a branch until the next breath of wind.

Here’s what’s curious, though: This tenuous grip on happiness isn’t unique to OCD people. At one point or another, everyone invests their well-being in things that fail. Some are sturdier than others, sure. Where an OCD person’s just-so feeling may be no sturdier than a dandelion, a non-OCD person’s may be in something relatively durable like their kids, spouse, job or friends. But it doesn’t matter. All but one foundation can be taken away.

King Solomon proved the point by going all-out for something all of us enjoy: pleasure. He did it on purpose—as a kind of experiment—just to see how it would play out. Cue James Brown’s I Feel Good.  If it pleased him, Solomon appropriated it. We’re talking unlimited women, wine, luxury, finery, palaces, servants, experiences, everything. He had the means to do it, and he did—more wholeheartedly than anyone before or since. He pursued the same pleasures we pursue, only to the nth degree on account of his infinite resources.

But the intensity of his commitment to this featherweight “bedrock” didn’t lessen its susceptibility to wind. He got bored of everything. The pleasure eventually ran out. And when it did, Solomon expressed his sublime sense of futility in a book—Ecclesiastes.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” he starts out. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What a rage he must’ve been in when he wrote those words, realizing as he did that the degree of his pursuit didn’t change the end result.

That’ll happen when a paradigm collapses and its futility dawns on you. It happens when you’ve invested everything in something that can go away. Concluded C.S. Lewis, almost as if he’d been through the same wringer as Solomon, “All that is not eternal is out of date.” Anything less, essentially, is a passing fashion trend we’ll make fun of a decade later. How could we have ever worn that? we ask—ironically, as we drop the old clothes off at Goodwill enroute to the mall for more.

What goes around comes around, right? We race from one thing to the next, but we never arrive. Not permanently. That was Solomon’s observation, too. As he wrote poetically in Ecclesiastes 1:7-8, “All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

The “sea is never full” for us OCD people either, is it? We fill it, it drains. We fill it again. Round and round, never stopping. And yet ever before us is the myth of fullness, telling us that if we stick to it, it’ll work. This time, it’ll work!

Solomon discovered that lie. Using more time and resources than we’ll ever have, he funded an inhuman campaign to achieve permanence with the impermanent . . . only to end up the same place he’d have been if he’d spent just ten minutes and ten cents. And, like Lewis, that pushed him to a conclusion: “I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it” (Ecclesiastes 3:14, my emphasis).

Although Solomon’s follies are recorded for us, they’re not the part of him that lasted. His follies are a cautionary tale meant to spare us our own. What lasted—and benefits us still today—is Solomon’s wisdom. It’s his realizations about the follies that stick. Our OCD takeaway parallels that: When we place our well-being in the impermanent mental and physical gymnastics of OCD, all of that fuss dies with us. In fact, it dies on the next breeze. It’ll have been for nothing, no matter the resources we devote to it. We can’t look long enough, fiddle long enough, fret long enough. It’s unappeasable, always going out of style but never in style.

But in our hearts, Christ-believing OCD friends, we know there are “forever things,” don’t we? Durable, eternal things that never go out of date, die or disappear. That’s because they are of God, not us. Despite what OCD tells us, we cannot produce permanence. But what God has made is so perfectly permanent that nothing can be added to it or taken away from it to make it any better. So . . . why would we even try?

You’ve likely heard this couplet by C.T. Studd: “Only one life, ’twill soon be past; Only what’s done for Christ will last.” Like Solomon’s folly, the things we’ve done to appease ourselves—our obsessions and compulsions—evaporate. But the Godly wisdom Solomon left lasted, and in fact has guided generations to an enduring Kingdom.

When we consider how to spend our energies today, OCD friends, we need to ask ourselves, “This thing I’m considering doing—how well is it anchored to eternity?” If the grip’s so precarious that it won’t outlast the day—much less our lives—then we may want to think again.