Lent Devotions – Day 4 – March 8th 2025

“He has made everything beautiful in its time.”

Lorna Souter

Many of us will recall the 1960s song by Pete Seeger, Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season), which echoes the poetry of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 in our passage today. These verses resonate with people from all walks of life as they so realistically describe the constant ebb and flow of experience, the ever-changing seasons of our lives. We are familiar with these contrasting events that happen in the warp and weft of our world.

Interestingly, for many of us, in the second part of chapter 3, verse 5, we read that there is ‘a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing’. This may have taken on a new depth of meaning as we travelled through the Covid years. The inability to embrace, shake hands or even stand or sit close to each other, had a major impact. We may also very much identify with the second line of verse 6, when we realise we have spent too much time keeping things and now need to downsize and throw things away or recycling them.

As the writer of Ecclesiastes or ‘the Teacher’ as he is often referred to, invites us to look objectively at the unceasing cyclical rhythm of life, we find it is an honest appraisal of the way things are and not an attempt to see life through rose-coloured spectacles. We recognise that as we journey through life, there will be highs and lows to meet. But another insight that the Teacher offers is that we should not see all of this as a meaningless treadmill from which we can’t escape.

The laws of life are at times troubling and painful and we are often at a loss to understand them. But the Teacher encourages us that God ‘has made everything beautiful in its time.’

We may not follow all that God has done from the beginning to the end, but God sees and holds the big picture. His enduring, loving purpose will in the end prevail. In the meantime, we are each called to make the most of life, to press on in living caring lives and to keep trusting that God will make all things right in his time.

Faithful God, we may not always understand the changing seasons of our lives, but we know that you hold all things in your hands. And in your timing, all will be well. Amen.