I just got an email canceling an event in 2021. It seems that the pandemic will continue to drag on well into next year.
I’m turning to Ecclesiastes for lessons on how to cope.
Tough Season
Everyone seems to like the beginning of Ecclesiastes 3. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven,” the Preacher writes before listing all kinds of good and bad things that happen in life.
The passage is beautiful, but it’s also sad. We’re not in control of the seasons he describes. There’s “a time to be born, and a time to die, and we don’t choose either. Also, the seasons he describes cancel each other out: planting is followed by plucking up, mourning by dancing, and so on. Add together all the activity mentioned in his list and you’re back to where you begin.
No wonder the preacher ends by asking, “What gain has the worker from his toil?”
I find this passage helpful at a time like this. We didn’t choose this season, and we have no control over when it ends. God doesn’t promise that we will always face pleasant circumstances. In fact, Ecclesiastes prepares us for how hard life can be.
This passage gives us permission to acknowledge that we’re in a tough season and that we’re not in control of how long it lasts.
Canadian pastor Mark Buchanan writes about a tough season in his life. “It would end, in time, but not by my own doing. My responsibility was simply to know the season, and match my actions and inactions to it. It was to learn the slow hard discipline of waiting.” I like that. We can know the season, match our actions and inactions, and wait for when the season will change.
Even Tough Seasons Have Gifts
I’m surprised by what the Preacher says next. “I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
His application? “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.”
We can’t control what season we’re in. Even in tough seasons, though, God gives us gifts to enjoy. Instead of longing for a life we don’t have, we can enjoy the one we have with all its challenges. We can embrace life for what it is, not what we want it to be.
As the pandemic goes on, Ecclesiastes gives us permission to admit that we’re in a tough season, and we don’t have much control over how long it will last. But it also reminds us to keep our eyes open for God’s good gifts in this tough season, and to make the most of his blessings even in these tough times.
