A Time for Everything

It has been an interesting morning. Two calls have I made. One to a 30+ year friend to wish her a happy 65^th birthday and to take a few minutes to remember. The other to a dear friend who is at that dreadfully anticipated one year mark of the sudden and unexpected death of her 23 year old daughter. Two calls – for very different reasons – both very remarkable (if that is the word) in their time.

Charles Dickens wrote in his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”.  An appropriate statement for my morning. It is interesting to me that these are some of the first words of a book that tells of sacrifice and resurrection and redemption during a period of tremendous chaos, the time of the French Revolution.

Time – by definition it is a system of intervals, a sequential measure of activities, very linear, very distinct in its reference to periods of time. The irony is that its definition includes continuous and indefinite. We have taken something beyond our comprehension and tried to apply limited measure to it – centuries, years, days, minutes, instances, seasons.

The well-known passage in Ecclesiastes 3 speaks to time - a time to be born, to die, to weep, to laugh, to search, to give up, to tear, to mend, to love, to hate, for war, for peace (just to list a few). But a couple of verses later Solomon speaks to God’s time. In verse 11 – 12 he writes, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” God, Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, transcends the time we know – that time of seasons, of best and worst, of periods (isn’t it interesting that a period is a stopping place in a statement?).

How wonderful to know that God makes everything beautiful in its time. God has eternity to work with. He is not restrained by our understanding, or lack thereof, of temporal, sequential, linear time. He “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Rev. 1:8) His time is not measured by periods, but by the impact of His sacrifice, His resurrection, His redeeming grace. It is He who will make beautiful our past poor choices, our current missteps, our future wanderings. It is He who will bring beauty to everything – even the searching, the tearing, the weeping, the dying - even the years, the days, the evenings and mornings, the seasons – all in His perfect time.

Robbin Holland

Hope Clinic for Women staff