To Everything a Season

To Everything a Season

A landscape photographer spent thirty years documenting the same lake in four seasons. She made a book of the photographs. The same lake: ice-locked in January, first tentative green in March, lush and teeming in July, breathtaking color in October. 'Same body of water,' she wrote in the introduction. 'Radically different appearances. Every state is beautiful. None is permanent. The lake doesn't fight the season — it simply receives it, becomes what the season calls it to become, and trusts the next season will come.' A reader wrote to her: 'You have explained Ecclesiastes 3 in photographs better than any sermon I have heard.'

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 is the most famous catalogue of contrasts in ancient literature: a time to be born and to die, to plant and to uproot, to weep and to laugh. The Preacher is not celebrating the good times and mourning the bad ones — he is observing that all times belong to God's sovereign design. The word for 'time' (et) does not mean measured duration but appointed moment — the right time, the divinely designated moment. This is both sobering and liberating. Sobering because we cannot force seasons that have not come; liberating because we can trust that the season we are in is the right one for what God is doing. The winter of difficulty is not a mistake. The spring of renewal will not be denied. There is a time for everything. This is your time.