For Everything There Is A Season

Living well no matter what the time is

It is probably the pastor in me, but at the end of every year and the beginning of a new I find myself in Ecclesiastes, remembering once again these words in Ecclesiastes 3:1, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.”  It’s not that I find this book of wisdom exciting, it’s just that I value the way it can disturb me, challenge me, and ultimately compel me to reflect on life’s realities.  This has especially been true as I approach the third year anniversary in January of Covid drastically changing my life.  Often conversations with family and physicians start with “before Covid” or “after Covid.”  A few months before Covid my doctor’s pronouncement at the conclusion of my annual physical was, “You are perfect!”  He didn’t mean that, but what he was saying was that I was in good health, all the tests revealed no problems, and my lifestyle insured a healthy future.  After Covid the same doctor said, “I can’t believe you are still alive!  Your life is going to be completely different now!”  And it has been – before and after.  The season of life has radically changed.

So many of you reading this understand what I am talking about in a visceral way.  It may be a health crisis for you or a loved one that has changed everything.  Perhaps it has been the death of a spouse, a child, a parent, a close friend.  Of course, it could be some catastrophic shift in your life – you lost your job, your marriage is in trouble, your kids are climbing one fool’s hill after another, the diagnosis is like a death sentence, retirement is anything but golden, the future looks bleak.   

The seasons of life do change, and sometimes the cynicism of Ecclesiastes invades our hearts.  The book sets the tone with these words, Ecclesiastes 2:2-3 (NIV), “Meaningless!  Meaningless!’ says the Teacher.  ‘Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless.’  What does a man gain…” – and though the teacher goes on in his way, we go on in ours.  As a pastor I have walked with a lot of people through the seasons of life.  I have witnessed birth and death, the beginning of new relationships and the end, heartbreak and heartache, age and illness robbing one of vitality, retirement erasing a sense of purpose, and the passage of time bringing more aches and pains than one can imagine.

When I was a young pastor of twenty-two years of age I was privileged to have a dear saint everyone called Miss Betty.  Miss Betty was in her pew every week, and she also wrote a column for the local newspaper in which she kept everyone up on what was going on in the neighborhood, including where people were if they were not in church.  Much to my relief, she had a lot of good things to say about me, expressing her belief that I showed some promise.  But most of all I remember her response to everyone who asked, “How are you today Miss Betty?”  She would always respond, “I’m fine for the shape I’m in.”  At times you would see a bit of smile when she said that, but other times a sense of sadness.  Her story was one of heartbreak, of the inability to have children, of her husband’s long and debilitating illness and horrible death, of her own health problems that made any movement a genuine pain and any thought of the future vague and uncertain.  And yet there was one thing I never heard Miss Betty say:  meaningless.  All is meaningless.

That feeling of meaninglessness when the seasons of life turn cold and dark can be a debilitating thing.  I think of another dear saint, a business man who looked forward to an early retirement, a bucket list of things he planned to do.  But that retirement didn’t happen the way he intended.  He soon grew bored with life, felt useless, lost, started having health problems, even relationship problems.  His identity had been his job, and with that at an end, he didn’t know who he was.  The season of life had changed and he found life empty.  Meaningless.

I know, these are not the kind of stories you want to hear at the end of one year and the beginning of a new year, but you who are reading this know they are true nonetheless.  When the seasons of life change for whatever reason, adjustments have to be made, and some make the transitions well while others do not.  In my own life the transition has been a challenge.  When I envisioned the future in my pre-Covid season of life, I saw retirement as a time of great opportunity to continue to preach, do some interim pastoral work, teach as an adjunct in a university as I had for almost a decade, do some wood working and star gazing, and enjoy the freedom to see my kids and grandkids whenever I wanted.  Covid changed all of that, forcing me into a new season of life, leaving me with a disease that will likely be the death of me, with limitations of strength and abilities that I did not have before, and a body that continues to be a stranger to me.  My first year of retirement was one of seeking to regain what I had lost – the ability to read and remember what I read, to not get overstressed by life, to return to some way of ministering to others in this new season of my life.  When I began writing this blog back in June of this year, I initially was responding to the repeated requests that I write a book and tell my story.  That seemed impossible, but then in a conversation with my son Chad I began to see a different way to make my way through this season, in these bite sized pieces called a blog.  More importantly, I embraced a larger purpose – not just to tell my story, but to share my journey and how I have learned to live life in a new season after a sudden, catastrophic, life-changing event in my life.  And more, not just to share my journey, but to find ways to help you, the reader, grapple with your life and what has taken place, the changes of seasons that are sometimes joyful, frequently disturbing, and at times devastating.

The teacher in Ecclesiastes tells his tale of searching for meaning and purpose in the face of the shifting seasons of life.  Some of it is pretty cynical, but other parts are enlightening.  He tells of his attempt to find meaning and purpose through the pursuit of pleasure and accumulation.  Though he experienced some temporary satisfaction in that, it didn’t last.  He knew as we all do that there has to be more to life than what we can acquire.  The teacher says some strange things, like it will do us some good to go to a funeral, just to remember our mortality, or that all the knowledge we might gain in life might look good on diplomas but won’t necessarily make us wise in the way that counts.  But he also says some good things, like paying attention to what time it is in your life so you can make the most of it, and remembering to reverence the God who has made you and will call you home.

I could say more about this, but all the focus on the seasons of life and the matter of time makes me think of a calendar.  Not just any calendar, not the ones that pop up on my cell phone or that decorates the side of our refrigerator with funny sayings about cats.  No, I am talking about the kind of calendar I have kept all of my life as a pastor and to this very day in this season of life, the kind of calendar that consists of little boxes that you can write notes and appointments in.  By means of this calendar I can look at any day of the week and see what I have going on – make this visit on this day, call this person that day, work on this blog, take time with this family member.  Day by day in my pre-Covid season I more or less lived by that sort of calendar, and even in the season I am in now I still keep it, though there tends to be a lot of blank boxes.  But this is what I did and still do – I move through the week one square at a time day by day. 

Years ago I came across something that Lewis Smedes wrote in his book, How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong?  I think it is easy to envision what he says:

I bought a brand new date book recently, the kind I use every year – spiral-bound, black imitation leather covers wrapped around pages and pages of blank squares.  Each square has a number to tell me which day of the month I am in at the moment.  Each square is a frame for one episode of my life. Before I am through with the book, I will fill the squares with classes I will teach, people I will eat lunch with, and everlasting committee meetings I will sit through.  And these are only the things I cannot afford to forget: I fill the squares, too, with things I do not write down for me to remember, thousands of cups of coffee, some lovemaking, some praying, and, I hope, gestures of help to my neighbors.  Whatever I do, it has to fit inside one of those squares on my date book.

I live one square at a time.  The four lines that make the square are the walls of time that organize my life.  Everything I do has to fit into one square; I cannot straddle the lines.

Each square has an invisible door that leads to the next square.  At a silent stroke, the door opens and I am pulled through it as if by a magnet, sucked into the next square in the line.  There I will again fill the time frame that seals me, fill it with my busyness, just as I did the square before.  As I get older, the squares seem to get smaller.

One day, I will walk into a square that has no door.  There will be no mysterious opening and no walking into an adjoining square.  One of the squares will be terminal.  I do not know which square it will be.  (Lewis Smedes, How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong?, p. 179-180)

You understand – we live our lives filling the squares.  We can do it chaotically, looking back and saying, “where did the day, or the week, or the month go?” We can stuff lots of activities in a square but leave out the truly important things in life.  And we can say to ourselves, “tomorrow, when I get into the next square, I will do better.”

Of course, we don’t know how many tomorrow’s we may have left. 

Say we plan to live 85 years – isn’t that a great way to put it, we “plan” to live, as if we have much to say about it.   But say we plan to live 85 years – that is 31,025 squares we have to fill. 

Suppose you are 25 year old – you have 21,900 squares left to reach age 85 – not bad. 

Suppose you are 50 – now you have 12,775 left.  Quite a drop, but still a lot left. 

Suppose you are 65 – now you have 7,300. 

Age 70 – 5,475. 

One more, age 80 – 1,825 squares left to fill.

Of course, we don’t know when we enter the last square – it may be at age 85 or 90 or even 100.  Of course, it may be much earlier as well.

And so how do we live our lives with meaning and joy regardless of the season we find ourselves in?  The season you are in right now, this last week of 2023, as you read these words?

I want to suggest to you that you make a list of priorities for each day, marking that which is essential for making the most of your season of life.  As negative as the Teacher can be in the book of Ecclesiastes, he does have some good advice.  He tells us to take joy in what you can, the good times of life, the relationships you have, the opportunities, living in the present instead of fretting about the future.  He calls upon us to remember our mortality, something we may not do very seriously until some health crisis comes our way.  But also, he says you need to remember your Creator, this God who breathed life into you, who has been Immanuel, God with you, through all the times of your life.  Remember Him, and revere Him – the Teacher uses the word fear, but that means to revere, honor, give God the most important place in your life.  And as far as you can determine things, live rightly, do the things God says are best for you.  Do you see the list?  Rejoice, remember, revere, live rightly. 

Through the years I have added two more things to that list, two commands which Jesus said were the most important of all – love God with all you are and all you have, and love others, even those who aren’t loveable. 

Now, all of this may be overwhelming, so much so you may be tempted to just be happy when good times are taking place and miserable when things are going badly.  But if this list becomes the priority each and every day, if this list becomes primary in your life regardless of the season – well, I don’t think you will spend your time talking like the Teacher did in Ecclesiastes.

Rejoice, remember, revere, live rightly, love God, love others.  Jot it down in your calendar if you will, each day so you are reminded.  Do what one university student did after I shared this concept with a class I taught – she sent me a picture when the semester was over of a card she had put up on her work space, a card she would see first thing every day.  It said “Above all today I will live this way” – and there was the list.

Now, I am not done with my thoughts and reflections in this area.  One of the things I notice is that even the tough times of life, the seasons of life that scar us for the rest of our days, can play a positive part in how we care for others.  We can be, as one writer put it, wounded healers, those who can care for others in greater ways because of the journey they have been forced to take.  Perhaps some good can come from those tough times – we will go in that direction in my next blogs.

But for now – I want to finish Lewis Smedes’ story and this image of the calendar.  You remember what he wrote, that one day we enter the final square of our lives.  He wrote, “We live one square at a time.  As we get older, they seem to get smaller.  One of the squares will be terminal.  But we do not know which square it will be.”

Here is how it was in Smedes’ life as reported by John Ortberg in his book, When The Game Is Over It All Goes Back In The Box, p. 135-136.  When Lewis Smedes was 81 years old, he was up on a ladder putting Christmas lights around the outside of his house.  He slipped and fell and hit his head and went into a coma and died a few days later.  That final square, the one he had written about years earlier in his book, came one day for him.  Maybe he thought he would live to age 85 – maybe he thought he had 1460 squares left.  But he didn’t.

Smedes’ life looked nothing like what he thought it would starting out.  He came from a family of blacksmiths, but he didn’t have the right body.  When he graduated from high school he was six feet four inches tall and weighed 120 pounds.  He tried to sign up for the army when World War II broke out, but the doctor just laughed, the country didn’t need soldiers that badly.  On the way home, Smedes stopped by the Red Cross to donate blood, but they wouldn’t take it, he needed it more than they did.  He would never make it as a soldier or a blacksmith, so he filled the squares with teaching and writing and friendship and faith that touched thousands of lives.

What did Smedes believe about that final square?  That it wasn’t a box at all – it turns out to be a door.  The four walls that have confined us melt away, and time is no more.  And our real life, far from being over, turns out to have just begun. It is the endless day, eternity with the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes says our spirit goes back to God who has created us, and because of that we need to live our lives wisely, meaningfully, each and every day whatever the season of life is.  Let’s do that, keeping our list, living it out to the glory of God – rejoice, remember, revere, live rightly, love God, love others.  In all seasons of life.

*By the way, if my reflections inspire you to read Ecclesiastes, do so in a contemporary version so it will make a bit more sense. It is written in a poetic way, but translations like the New Living Translation or The Message make the message of the book easier to grasp.