A time for every purpose

"To every thing there is a season." — Ecclesiastes 3:1

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

I have been thinking about this verse the way you think about a piece of furniture you have had so long you forget it is there. It has been in me since I was young, since before I understood what it costs to believe it. When you are young and you hear that there is a time for every purpose, you hear permission. When you are older and you hear it, you hear something closer to the truth, which is that the seasons do not ask your permission and the purposes are not always yours.

There was a time for planting and I planted. There was a time for raising children and I raised them. There was a time for burying my husband and I buried him. The verse does not say any of this will make sense while it is happening. It says there is a time for it, which is different from saying there is a reason for it, and I have come to think that the difference between those two things is where most of the living happens.

June is the season of growing. The garden knows it. The light knows it. The mornings are warm before I get to them and the evenings go on past what seems reasonable and the world is doing what the verse says the world does, which is turn.

I do not use this verse to comfort myself. I have heard people use it that way, and I do not judge them for it, but for me the verse is not comfort. It is honesty. It is the voice of a man who looked at the whole span of a life and said: this is what it is. There is a time for weeping and a time for laughing and neither one lasts, and the turning is the thing, and the turning does not stop.

The morning is bright. The coffee is warm. This is the season I am in, and I am in it, and the verse holds the weight of that without explaining it, which is all I have ever needed a verse to do.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.