Essential No. 8: Discern the Time and Season
In the previous chapter, I explained that the last four essentials deal more with how to live life after the storm has passed. It's one thing to live in the storm and survive it, and it is a totally different matter to rebuild our world after it has been ransacked by the storms of life. Storm-proofing our lives include both.
After the flood, God declared: "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." Genesis 8:22
In this one verse, we find one of the most important truths about storms and how to rebuild our world after a big one has devastated everything. Over time and seasons, storms will come, and rebuilding our world is also done over time and seasons.
Time and Season
To discern times and seasons it is important to first understand the fundamental difference between the two. Time is the measure of beginning and the end. Time passes and never returns. For example, I was once a teenager and that is not coming back, ever. Time cannot be stored, put on hold, or added to. Once it passes it is gone.
Seasons, on the other hand, are moments in time that repeat themselves for a given purpose. Spring, for instance, is there as a season to renew, restart and is conducive to growth. You can say it is "the season of favor" or a favorable season. Summer is there to deepen our roots or establish things. Autumn is designed for transitions. Winter is clearly a time to rest if not mark an ending to set us up for yet another beginning.
Noah faced a world that had been ravaged by the worst flood to ever hit the earth. In order to restore his world, he needed to know that time (day and night) and seasons (summer and winter) will never cease. Rebuilding meant it would take time and had to be undertaken across the seasons.
It's All Part of a Grand Design
A parallel verse to Genesis 8:22 is Ecclesiastes 3:1 which says, "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:…"
The above verse and the ones that follow plainly tell us that in life there will be challenging times (storms) as well as times to rebuild. Here's a sampling: "a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together, a time to tear and a time to sew."
A natural part of time and seasons are storms and rebuilding after them. This is how God designed life to be. Seasons are often a subtle but sometimes not so subtle message that life is not linear, rather, it is a series of ups and downs.
God allows these challenging times to signal us to let go of certain things and embrace new opportunities, that we would otherwise be oblivious to. This was the case with Noah and his family.
Predictable - Unpredictable
Tears and laughter, starting and ending, keeping and throwing away, like times and seasons will never cease. If all of life were about crying then it will be a pitiful world. And if all of it were about laughter then we will never learn empathy. God has so designed it that we need both and He has embedded these experiences in life's times and seasons.
The consistency of day and night (time) and the passing of seasons help us predict and plan. But the same times and seasons send us unpredictable storms, challenges, and changes.
When we are born we see a predictable start. We start out as cute dependent crawling babies and end up as mature walking independent adults. A new time and season send us out on a new journey of strength, abilities, and independence only to arrive at another time and season of weakness, disability, and dependence again.
One starts but eventually ends. In a very real sense, God ended an era of sin and violence during Noah's days and rebooted the world in order to save it from decay. This is God's grand design. A way of looking at life that will encounter storms, big and small.
Designed for Stability
Ecclesiastes 3 starts off with the words, "a time to be born and a time to die…"
Solomon's point is simple; the two most important things in life are birth and death. In both cases, we have neither any say or any control when and how they will happen. Solomon is simply alerting us to the reality of births or rebirths (building or rebuilding) and deaths (storms and endings).
His writing also tells us that if we understand this reality, there is ample time for anything and everything, whether we are in the midst of a storm or we are rebuilding our world.
The rest of Ecclesiastes 3 is a surrendering to the reality of times and seasons and that the only source of stability is God Himself, he writes: "I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it." Ecclesiastes 3:14
But he assures us that regardless of the storms and the challenges of rebuilding - God makes everything beautiful in His time (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
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