A reflection on Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 for Friday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time.
“There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.”
It is one of those Scripture passages we tend to find beautiful until we are living through a season we did not choose. A time to laugh sounds lovely. A time to dance? Sign me up. A time to weep, lose, mourn, and tear down? I would just as soon skip those verses, thank you very much.
But Ecclesiastes does not offer us a life made up only of pleasant seasons. It tells the truth about being human. There are beginnings and endings, gatherings and partings, building and tearing down. Some seasons arrive wrapped in joy, and others show up without an invitation and stay much longer than we think they should.
I have noticed that I am much better at trusting God’s timing when His timing happens to agree with mine. When the answer comes quickly, the door opens, the relationship heals, or the plan falls neatly into place, it is fairly easy to say, “God is good.” It gets harder when we are staring at a closed door wondering whether God has misplaced the key.
Most of us carry some version of the life we thought we would have. We picture how our marriage will look, what our children will choose, how our family relationships will unfold, what retirement will be like, how healthy we will remain, or where we will be by a certain age. Then life has the nerve to ignore our carefully prepared outline.
Suddenly we find ourselves in a season we never planned to enter.
Maybe it is a season of caregiving when we thought we would finally have more freedom. Maybe it is living alone when we imagined growing old beside someone. Maybe our children are grown and making choices we wish they would not make, and we are learning the painful difference between loving someone and being able to steer their life. Maybe we are grieving a relationship, a job, a dream, our health, or simply the version of ourselves we used to be.
Ecclesiastes tells us that God “has made everything appropriate to its time.” That can be a difficult verse when something feels anything but appropriate. Yet the reading goes on to say something that may explain why we struggle so much: God has put eternity into our hearts, but we cannot understand His work from beginning to end.
There it is. We want the whole story while we are still standing in the middle of the chapter.
We want to know why this happened, where it is leading, how long it will last, and what God plans to do with it. We would appreciate a little heavenly itinerary, preferably printed clearly enough that we can put it on the refrigerator.
Instead, God usually gives us today.
That can feel terribly insufficient until we remember that today is where grace lives. We cannot receive tomorrow’s grace this morning, and we cannot go backward and change yesterday. We can only meet God here, in this particular season, with these particular people and these particular circumstances.
This does not mean every painful thing is directly sent by God or that suffering is somehow good simply because it happens. We live in a world marked by sin, human freedom, illness, loss, and consequences. But our faith tells us that none of those things places us outside God’s reach. He can enter even a season we never wanted and bring grace from ground we would never have chosen.
Sometimes our greatest spiritual struggle is not getting through a difficult season but accepting that we are actually in it. We keep trying to live in yesterday or hurry into tomorrow. We tell ourselves that life will really begin again when this problem is fixed, when this person changes, when the grief eases, when the finances improve, or when God finally answers the prayer the way we have been asking Him to.
Meanwhile, Jesus is standing in today.
Perhaps there is something God wants to teach us here that could not be learned in the season before. Perhaps there is someone we are meant to love differently now. Maybe the invitation is simply to loosen our grip and admit that we do not know what comes next.
That is not easy for those of us who enjoy a plan. I suspect many of us would happily surrender to God’s will if He would first provide the complete agenda, expected outcomes, and a reasonable explanation for any delays.
But that is not surrender. That is project management.
Trust says, “Lord, I do not understand this season, but I believe You are here.”
The Psalm reminds us that our lives are brief, “like a breath,” and yet God cares for us. There is something strangely comforting in that. Our lives are small in comparison with eternity, but they are not insignificant to Him. Every season matters because God is present in every season.
There will be a time when the thing we are carrying now will no longer be ours to carry. There will be a time when today’s unanswered question has either been answered or no longer needs an answer. There will be new joys, new sorrows, new beginnings, and new letting go.
And eventually there will be eternity, where we will finally see what we cannot see from here.
Until then, perhaps faith looks less like understanding God’s entire plan and more like taking His hand in the part of it we are living today. We pray the Rosary. We go to Mass. We sit before the Blessed Sacrament when we have no words left. We ask Our Lady, who knew something about unexpected seasons, to help us trust the God who sees the whole story.
We do not have to love every season.
We only have to remember that no season lasts forever, and no season is lived without God.