A Time For Everything

 The other night I sat on the couch, cuddled up in a blanket, watching a documentary about a military chaplain who had been stationed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. It was incredibly revealing to hear this Army chaplain who had offered comfort to so many during the aftermath of the attack share about his own personal struggles to deal with his emotions and pain. He talked about how it was a mistake to throw himself so much into caring for others that he neglected his own need to grieve and process. He admitted to still bearing emotional scars from that day, to having bouts of post-traumatic stress in the years that have followed. As he now has opportunities to talk to young chaplains-in-training, he tells them to make their own suffering a part of them. To accept the seasons of hardship life brings them and not to neglect their own pain in an effort to help others deal with theirs. 

 This story got me thinking about how we view the seasons in our lives. Later that night, I was reading the famous passage in Ecclesiastes 3 that talks about "a time for everything under heaven." But after watching this program, something interesting jumped out at me as I read...

"There is...a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh.

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace."

 I realized that, while we are quite familiar with this part of Scripture, we don't often know how to live it. We accept that the authors views on life are true - all these things are our reality on this earth - but I don't think we understand how to accept the seasons of life the way we should. It's like we desire to always live in the positive vibe - to always be in planting, building, embracing, loving, birthing, keeping, mending mode and resisting the other side of things - that there are seasons of death, uprooting, wounding, tearing down, morning, scattering, silence, weeping, etc. And these seasons, while certainly not pleasant, are equally as beneficial in our life story as the happier times. But we don't see it that way. We resist these other seasons and see them as negative. In the words of the chaplain, we don't know how to "make our suffering a part of us." But here...right in the Bible itself, we see God's inspired words through Solomon that both types of seasons are unavoidable parts of our story. We must have part in both, or we are not truly living. Life means taking both the pleasant and the hard and accepting that both can and must exist together. They are part of the cycles of our existence, and only in eternity will we discover what we've forever longed for - a life with nothing but good. Here, in this fallen world, there are reminders of sin, hatred, war, sadness, grief, and pain all around us. We cannot escape them even as hard as we try to. Adversity and suffering finds us all, and no one is immune. But it's what you choose to do through that suffering - through that co-existing of happy-sad - that determines how you live your one life. How you grow. How you change. How you let your seasons re-make you.  

 I shut my Bible that night and reminded myself to take the seasons as they come. Perhaps you need to be reminded of that too! And maybe we both need to realize that even the seasons of hardship...when it seems like suffering is the norm, and hope appears distant...even those serve their purpose under Heaven. For nothing is ever wasted in the kingdom of God.