Everything-Time

Clock strikes the hour, and I'm thinking about time. How there never seems to be enough time but also, how time feels like it can crawl and how all our days are one set amount of ticks and how we spend them is up to us. Is time our friend, or are we instead the slave of our time? 

Thoughts wander to the passage in Ecclesiastes... 

"For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 

a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

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

a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace." 

Suddenly, I notice something I've never caught before: I often want to choose my life-seasons instead of accepting what the seasons have brought to me. In an effort to not be ruled by time, I often try to control time and then end up disappointed that time has not given me what I asked for. A closer look reveals that I too frequently live by halves... 

Always wanting the opposite of what you're given can leave you bitter, and no soul ever grew into something beautiful for God without being denied and no cross can be carried and no Savior fully followed unless you're willing to detach yourself from your wants and let the seasons come as they may. 

Until God is all you want, you'll always be in a race with time instead of a walk with time. You'll always be chasing more instead of seeing that what you actually need most is already here. Because time is no substitute for Him.

I think sometimes we can read a passage like this and say we get it - that life moves in cycles and things never stay the same, and there are seasons for all... but do we really believe there is a time for everything? 

All too often, it seems to me we want to live in the happy part of time... the time to be born, to laugh, to heal, to dance, to build up, to embrace... we want to live in that all the time without remembering that we cannot pick what part of life we live. Life must be taken as a whole. 

All living isn't just one perpetual party and, unless you understand that, hardship will continue to surprise you when it comes. There is a time to die, to mourn, to pluck up what's been planted, to tear, to lose. It can come in the form of divorce, death, separation, betrayal, unmet expectations, health decline, financial loss, getting fired from a job... anything, really. And however it arrives, it brings with it the reminder that nothing is for forever. Nothing that is, except for God. 

Your only hope in all changes is to know that He will never change and that through the uncertainty of it all, His promise to make all things beautiful in time remains true. When you can count on nothing else, you can count on this. 

Learning how to live wholly, fully is about learning to accept and welcome whatever today's time brings. After all, He said not to worry about tomorrow because the present has its own trouble. As clock-hands perpetually move and seconds turn into minutes and then hours, we are presented with the choice of whether or not to redeem time or ruin time. To take what it offers and count it as divine gift, however painful, or to fight it and lose our one life refusing to embrace the inevitable. Because suffering is inevitable and any farmer will tell you that you can't have a worthy crop until the soil has been tilled and the ground broken and aren't all worthwhile things born out of the ripping apart and the breaking open? 

Ecclesiastes is true that we cannot figure out God and that all His ways are mystery, and how can we be truly content until we've become content with the unanswered and the opposites - when we're okay with not having to figure out the why's of every season and the details of time and we can simply say, "It is well" even when time has brought with it a hard thing we did not want? 

"Whatever God does endures forever," it tells me. And yes, that includes the contrary things that cross my will and cause me to resign to a bigger plan. To know that there is, indeed, a time for everything. Even a time for the stuff I'd rather run from and resist. But even these will be used in His plan. 

My duty to take them and give thanks. Offer them as sacrificed praise and turn time (with all its unknowns) into a friend that can take me deeper with God.