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# The year comes level
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-year-comes-level/
- Published: 2026-09-22T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T09:59:59.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." — Ecclesiastes 3:11*

Tonight a little after eight o'clock the year comes level. Equal light, equal dark, and then the dark starts winning until Christmas.

I looked it up years ago because I wanted to know the hour, and now I know it, and I am not sure the knowing improved anything. The sun does not do it all at once. There is no moment out on the front porch when you feel the balance tip. There is just an evening in late September that is cool enough for a sweater, and the goldenrod gone rusty along the fence, and the light going at a quarter past seven now instead of nine.

Ecclesiastes says he has made everything suitable for its time. That is a comfortable sentence and people stop there, on a plaque, in nice lettering.

The rest of the verse is the part I have been sitting with. *He has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.*

He gave us the sense of it. Not the sight of it. That is a strange gift when you hold it up to the light. We are the only creature on this property that knows the days are shortening. Biscuit does not know. He knows he is cold at four in the morning and comes closer. Junebug sits in that kitchen window and follows the sun across the sill and has no opinion about March. The indigo bunting that was on the feeder in July is gone, and he did not sit on the fence wire first and think about last year before he went.

I do. I stand at that railing and I can feel October coming and Earl's birthday in it, and Thanksgiving, and the whole cold end of the year stacked up behind this evening like cars on a siding. And I can look back just as far. Seventy-seven Septembers, and I can call up maybe nine of them.

So I have the sense of past and future and I cannot find out what he has done from the beginning to the end. Both of those are true at once. That is not a contradiction, I have decided. That is a job description.

The knowing that there is a whole shape is what makes you a person. The not being shown the shape is what makes you a person who has to trust somebody.

If I could see the end of it I would not need him. I would need a calendar.

The year comes level tonight and goes on over. I will be inside by then with the lamp on.

*Lord, I cannot see the shape of it. Thank you that somebody can.*