This blog is not the first time I have written regarding Solomon’s wise words in Ecclesiastes. See http://estherrigsby.com/2014/07/04/just-a-piece/ . However, after one of the most hectic summers of my life, I feel compelled to return to it.
Ecclesiastes 3. (ESV)
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 seek, and a time to lose;
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…
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
I said goodbye this morning to my youngest child as he went to board a plane bound for college. Letting go of my children has never been an easy thing for me to do, even though by number four I ought to know the drill by now. No worries, due to other circumstances, I am not an empty nester, that is not the problem. It is just that I have learned by now that they never come home as the same person.
I have not read the entirety of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, but I feel like the watcher in this quote who knows from experience the road before my young pilgrim.
“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away…You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us – we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”
Time, it too shall pass.
The same week that we sent one off to college, we celebrated the fourth birthday or our granddaughter, and we also brought one of our parents home from the hospital following an illness. Time passes.
What I have found is that only by living with eternity in our hearts can we truly see the beauty that God is making in the times of our lives. Otherwise just grieving the losses that we experience over time would overwhelm us.
Now lest this post become too maudlin even for an Eeyore, like me, let me conclude with the following:
I am quite certain that my rock-carrying, garden-building big son who left for college this morning is glad that Solomon in his great wisdom included that there is a time to gather stones and a time to cast them away.
Keep eternity in your heart my son; God is going to make all things beautiful in His time!