There is a season for everything. There is no perfect time and no fixed and permanent season. We live “between” changes all our lives. Eternity is in our hearts as Solomon says in verse 11 but everything else is in process.

There are six categories of seasons in these 8 verses:

Seasons of life

Seasons of work

Seasons of emotions

Seasons of family and friends

Seasons of things

Seasons of the world

Verse 1 sets the boundaries of a time for everything but it also places us at a particular time. You and I were born for a certain time in the world. We often quote the book of Esther when we say “for such a time as this” but by that we do not mean normal times, do we? We mean times of special challenge or significance. After reading several biographies of Churchill, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin I can relate to that. They seem to have come on the scene at a time when history was at an inflection point and their greatness and flaws were a match with the times of crisis and opportunity. There is something special about their coming on the scene at just the right time and their having been prepared for that moment.

We tend not to think of our own lives that way because there may not be a great crisis or a moment when our lives make a difference in history. But, that is not what Scripture says about us. We all have a part to play. For some it is highly visible and obvious and for others it is hidden and unseen. We are all born into a particular time and that particular time has a task for us. Life has expectations for all of us in our moment.

You know I love Victor Frankl’s way of putting it in “Man’s Search for Meaning” written after his imprisonment in a Nazi death camp:

“Ultimately, man should not  ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

Each of us has been given an assignment. I’ve said before that is the original meaning of the word inheritance – a task or an assignment to fulfill. The task is not to spend our lives finding meaning or happiness as if either of those were actual destinations where we can arrive and the search is over. No, we are created to answer the question about our chief end as the Westminster Confession says, “The chief end of man , be open to God’s surprises. The things you could not plan or even imagine. Be open to a life with only one thing on the list – to glorify God.

Our work:

We ask too much of our work. As we talked about last week, we want work that gives us meaning. We want work that is a means to an end and too often that end is to answer the question, “What is in it for me? What does it profit a man?” Work is important but it is filled with unpredictable change when what we want is consistency without boredom. Work has almost become a form of entertainment and when it becomes dull we want to change the channel. Of course, we are often at the mercy of changes and decisions over which we have no control. The economy changes. We are reassigned, laid off, or moved.

William Bridges wrote the book titled “Transitions” about these times in our lives and it is not just work. It is about all the changes whether we initiate them or not. Some of our best changes come not from the easy times in our lives but from the times of turmoil. Scott Peck said it this way:

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

We all experience change but that is different from transition. Transition is when we successfully move from an ending through a neutral zone and then to a new beginning. We have trouble ending well as we have a tendency to simply quit, leave or move away. Ending well takes work. But sometimes we get to work and an announcement is made that our whole division has been eliminated. Things end but not well.

And then there is the wilderness or what he calls the neutral zone. We don’t like neutral zones so we tend to compress it and make it as short as possible. We want to move on but Bridges shows we cannot really move on until we have worked through that wilderness.

But then there is the new beginning if we have had closure on the past and accepted the necessity of the neutral zone. We move on into the next chapter, the next season and the next part of life having closed the door on what we left behind and turned our face toward what is to come. For everything there is a season.

In verse 4 we read about our emotions – weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing. When we are young those emotions are all over the place but as we age we learn to regulate them. My father had a good image for it. He said it is the difference between a Jeep and a limousine. Some people have a short wheelbase and the suspension system bounces us all over the place. Others have a long wheel base where there is time between the bumps. Age can lengthen the wheel base but it can also do just the opposite and make us less flexible and more rigid. There are also times in life when the bumps come so quickly and close together that we have trouble adjusting. There are periods of mostly weddings and births and then periods of mostly funerals and strangely now it seems there are both at the same time. Losses of friends, weddings and baby showers on the same day.

In verse 5 we read about relationships with family and friends. Stones are often ways of remembering important places and events. I told you about the stones I have collected over the years from different places that remind me of a time in the past. But there comes a time to scatter the stones and stop collecting them. Make room for new memories. Of course, stones are also piled up and used as boundary markers. There are times and circumstances where we need clear boundaries with people. We need a healthy separation.

There are times to embrace and refrain. I have learned this with my own children. I want to embrace in ways they may see as constraining them and forcing them back into our relationship when they were children. I am reluctant to see them as adults with their own choices to make. Sometimes I need to refrain from embracing. Sometimes they need to pile up a few stones for boundaries.

Verses 6-7 is about our relationship with things. We have seasons of accumulation that are appropriate. We need things. We enjoy things. We have them for a reason and they are for us to keep and care for. We are stewards of things. Then we have seasons when we temporarily get rid of things by moving or Spring cleaning but they come back, don’t they?

But there is a season for losing things – for saying good-bye to things and either passing them on or letting them go. It’s not making room for new things but making room for a new season in life that is best experienced without clutter and old stones. There is a time to “tear” or a time to separate ourselves from things that have supported and blessed our lives. There are good ties to the past and then there are things that only keep us bound to the past.

The singer songwriter Nanci Griffith from Seguin, Texas and Nashville died this week. A friend of hers tells the story of when Nanci invited her, a young singer, to join her on stage with several famous others.

When I was done, I handed Nanci her guitar back. She shook her head and said, “Keep it.” I froze, holding her engraved, signature sunburst Taylor 612 cutaway guitar in mid-air,question marks in both of my eyes. “It’s yours,” she said. “When I moved to Nashville, Harlan Howard gave me his guitar. I’m giving you mine.” I was speechless but somehow found the courage to say,“Will you sign it?”

She signed, “For Mary, because YOU WILL sing.”

I found out later it’s an old Nashville tradition to pass on a guitar. It’s an attempt to stay on the good side of the muse and the mystery. Some songwriters believe it is one way to keep songs flowing. Harlan gave Nanci one of his guitars because he felt there were no more   songs left in it for him but there might be some in there for her. Nanci had done the same for me.

And then in the second part of verse 7 and verse 8 we read about our relationship with the world. We live in a world that has declared war on silence. It is a world of opinion but not thought. We have become reflective in the wrong ways. We simply reflect what we have seen but there is very little meditation or contemplation. We repeat without much thought what we have heard and the next person does the same. We simply mirror instead of truly reflect.

Verse 7 does not describe someone afraid to speak but someone who knows when to speak because they have something to say. They measure their words. For people like that even their silences speak.

Finally, as much as we may hate it we are for much of our lives mostly at war. The season for war seems so much longer than that for peace. When one outbreak stops there is another to take its place.There have been very few years of genuine peace. There are wars that have been necessary and then wars where it feels like the passage in 2 Samuel 2.

“Abner son of Ner, together with the men of Ish-Bosheth son of Saul, left Mahanaim and went to Gibeon. Joab son of Zeruiah and David’s men went out and met them at the pool of Gibeon. One group sat down on one side of the pool and one group on the other side.

Then Abner said to Joab, “Let’s have some of the young men get up and fight hand to hand in front of us.”

“All right, let them do it,” Joab said.

So they stood up and were counted off—twelve men for Benjamin and Ish-Bosheth son of Saul, and twelve for David. Then each man grabbed his opponent by the head and thrust his dagger into his opponent’s side, and they fell down together.”There are things worthy of hatred and times for war but then there are times where it is merely sport for kings and generals. I’ve been listening to a podcast titled “Nixon’s War” and I am still shocked by the cold bloodedness of the decisions made to spend lives based on the timing of elections.

It would be easy to end there and conclude as Bertrand Russell and so many others have.

“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built…All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?”

We are not left there. Instead we read, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.” The world is not as Russell and other cynics have described it. There is beauty everywhere if we take the time to look. I’ve often quoted Mary Oliver because she is right about this one:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Or this:

Still, what I want in my life

Is to be dazzled –

To cast aside the weight of facts

And maybe even

To float a little above this difficult world.

We are not part of an endless and meaningless cycle of birth and death, joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. All of those are a part of our life but only for a season. Real life – Resurrection life – is yet to come but we have hints of it. Not in the renewal of ordinary life every Spring but in the resurrected life of Jesus where the body that is sown is perishable but is raised imperishable. it is raised in glory and in power and just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven.

When I was younger I laughed at the romanticism and naïveté of some poets but now I know they were right.

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand who said, ‘A whole I planned, youth shows but half; Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!”

Hear that again. Trust God. See everything. Do not be afraid.