There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
Just as the created world has a rhythmic pattern built into it, so too our lives within this world experience their own regularities which ebb and flow with the passing years. Ecclesiastes chapter 3 gives us a poem to show this - a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot…..
There is a time for everything - a time to retire. We as a family arrived in Anaghlone and Garvaghy just as our youngest daughter Gracie took her first steps as a one year old toddler. Now, sixteen years later she is exploring university options and I am getting ready to retire, how time has moved on, a mere breath. As a church family we have encountered many of the life scenarios that the poet of Ecclesiastes chp 3 records for us. As you read the poem you may recall people, situations, events and circumstances that the poet is presenting to us. Is it all meaningless as the poet suggests? That depends on the meaning of ‘meaningless’. Clearly not everything is meaningless, in fact the word accurately translated is ‘breath’ or ‘breeze’. Life is short - ‘time flies the older you get’. The poet is saying that everything is a puff of wind: here one minute and carried away the next. Therefore, living well in God’s world means recognising that when it comes to our own lives, we are not mini-gods, and that this is his creation, not ours. The poet of Ecclesiastes concludes that we should all “Remember your Creator ….. Remember him - before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken.”