A Season for Everything

There’s a time for everything, and time is finite. In fact, that’s the whole point. If time were not finite, it’d just be something like “the eternal beingness factor” that simply is. It wouldn’t be ‘time’ at all.

Now, God lives in “the eternal beingness factor” —or, as the book of Isaiah puts it, he “inhabits eternity.” But we do not. Nor, in fact, can we conceive of ‘being’ as anything other than time-bound. To be, as we experience it, is for things to happen—a concept that, by definition, involves time.

Good to know.

But now that I’ve sneezed out that brief foray into tasty philosophy, allow me to justify the attack of insanity with reference to something that may actually impact your life.

You are a man or a woman; old or young; somewhere in between; employed or not; a homeowner or not; with or without a spouse; with or without children, your sanity, your hearing, your hair.

Enjoy it. Embrace the baldness (if that’s where you are).

“There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and have his soul see good in his labor. This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God. For who can eat and who can have enjoyment outside of Him? … There is an appointed time for everything.” (Ecclesiastes 2:24-3:1)

Now, it is true that there is a time for “everything”. Solomon was not lying and nor was the Holy Spirit. But we must take Him both at his word and in the spirit of his word. “Everything,” for example, clearly does not include sin. There isn’t a time for sin. So there is no time to be joyless, because joylessness would disobey Paul’s clear instructions (1 Thess 5:16-18). In everything the Lord gives, in everything the Lord takes, in everything he says, in everything he permits, it is time to be joyful.

Enjoy your life—not because it will last forever but because it won’t, and joy is the only way to export it there.