Seasons

I’ve got to admit, one thing about 2020 that hasn’t gotten old are the memes. One of the more recent ones I’ve seen is a picture of a group of porta potties that were on fire. The caption read: ‘If 2020 was a scented candle’. There was another one from ‘The Office’ where Toby (the HR Manager) is 2020 and Michael says, “Why are you the way you are? Honestly, every time I try to do something fun or exciting, you make it not that way.”
Anyway, we know that 2020 is old and getting older. I have noticed that despite the changes we are facing, for our little community a lot of things are settling into a new routine. It’s not perfect and we still have a ways to go to be able to say this is normal, but at least it’s a routine. There’s consistency and a little more permanence at this time. To me, it feels so much better than April or May where so much was still in doubt.
And that got me thinking, especially now that we’re getting into my favorite season, that eventually we always fall back into a routine. We see that’s the nature of life in the Bible too. Though we have change, there’s always an overarching routine that occurs with it. And no matter what has happened in our society and culture, the seasons are still changing. They may be different than last year or 30 years ago, but there’s still the seasonal changes. King Solomon wrote about this in Ecclesiastes 3.1-8:
“There is a time for everything, and 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.” (NIV)
And what always strikes me from those verses are the negative aspects of it. ‘Kill’, ‘tear down’, ‘uproot’, ‘mourn’, ‘war.’ There is a time for these. Life is about those things. There is a time for a pandemic, we could say, but there is also a time for coming together and hugging each other, too. I pray we find patience and hope in knowing that day will come again. God bless.