In its time

I’ve always loved the first few verses of Ecclesiastes chapter 3. There’s a wonderful rhythm to it as the author talks about everything having its own time. A time to be born and a time to die. To plant and uproot, kill and heal.

You get the idea. It’s all about time and the seasons that all of us experience. After all that talk about time, the writer gets to verse 11 and makes the wonderful promise that God makes everything beautiful in its time.

Everything. Beautiful. In its time.

As I read that last night, something felt heavy. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I kept wondering why it mattered that God had the writer include the small word “its” in that statement. God doesn’t just make everything beautiful in time, as in if we live long enough it will all come together and work out. I know the promise of Romans 8:28. I know that God is working in every circumstance for my good and for his glory, but there seems to be something specifically special here in Ecclesiastes.

There is a time for everything, and that means there is a time for the season you and I are in to become beautiful. Everything is made beautiful in its time. Maybe its time is a time of birth or death, keeping or releasing, speaking or being silent. In each of those times there can be beauty if we trust the God who stands above time. The God who set eternity in our hearts in a way that while every season holds beauty, no one season holds fulfillment. That is found in God alone.

He makes everything beautiful in its time. He has also placed a longing in our hearts that can never be satisfied by time.

Ecclesiastes 3:10 makes so much more sense in light of this: “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.”

The burdens of seasons, time, and waiting have been given to us to draw us closer to the love of a Father who will be with us through all of them and yet will outlast each one of them.

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