“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”
- Ecclesiastes 3:1 (ASV)
Sometimes the counsel we offer someone else turns out to be exactly what we need to hear ourselves. It happened to me a number of years ago. A friend approached me whose daughter, his first-born, had graduated from high school and would soon be heading off to college. My friend was agonizing over the emptiness created by his daughter leaving home. Since my own children were a few years older he knew I had experienced the same emotions and wondered how I had handled it. “Don’t worry,” I assured him, “your life will soon be filled with new activities such as going to visit your daughter at college.” “Ah!” he replied as his whole demeanor suddenly shifted from sadness to excitement, “so now we can start looking forward to more road trips.” “Exactly,” I said.
I doubt my friend would remember that very brief conversation from all those years ago, but I do; for ironically, what I told him were the exact words I needed to hear with my own ears, that life consists of constantly changing seasons for each of us, and with each change, as with all transitions, come feelings of sadness and loss and nostalgia, even pain and suffering at times, but also hope and renewal, joy and excitement.
In 2008, after a hard-fought battle with cancer, Tee lost her dad, my father-in-law and the last among our four parents and our children’s grandparents. It had been a sad and difficult journey – the end of a season. Then, suddenly it seemed, the season changed only a few short weeks later with the arrival of our first grandchild, then the second only three weeks after that. Later, Tee wrote these beautiful words to a friend, “Little did I know the journey God was going to send me on in the last few months. It has been a walk with the past, the present, and the future, and a lesson in the completeness of life.”
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” Thousands of years ago the author of Ecclesiastes wrote those words, yet that is what I was reminded of in my own words I spoke to my friend that day. Like a road trip, the seasons of life take us on a journey with the past, the present, and future, ever teaching us about and leading us toward that completeness of life we all long for.