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Today's reading
December 15, 2025
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
My eyes were closed, but I wasn’t asleep. I had been just moments before, but as consciousness slowly broke through the blur of poor slumber, I just sat there for a moment. I took in the numbing sound of passenger chatter, the hiss of recycled air, the faint smell of plastic, exhaust, cleaning products, and B/O. All of this sensory clatter grounded me in an unfathomable reality: my wife and I were on a plane traveling to Uganda to meet our daughter.
It had been a difficult year. I had new responsibilities at work, and I had walked through the most significant interpersonal conflict with friends in my life.
I was a shell. I had tried desperately to fix what was going on—to make the right decisions and circumvent the inevitable—but my world was quicksand. Even seemingly right moves created a slow suck, sapping my spirit and stripping me of the confidence to make decisions that once felt so clear.
It is easy to believe that if we plan well enough, pray hard enough, or discern carefully enough, we can keep life steady—that seasons are doors that turn on the hinges of our choices. But on that trip, and in the long, tangled months before and after it, I began to realize something far more humbling and strangely freeing: I don’t control the seasons of my life. I move through them… but I do not command them.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon isn’t wrestling with whether God exists. He is wrestling with whether God’s existence truly matters. Is He involved? Is there rhyme and reason to what we experience on this earth? What truly gives purpose to our days?
And just before Solomon unspools a long reflection on the frustrations and injustices of life, he pauses and offers a poem—one that names the tension we all live inside. He says,
"To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born,
And a time to die;
A time to plant,
And a time to pluck what is planted;
A time to kill,
And a time to heal;
A time to break down,
And a time to build up;
A time to weep,
And a time to laugh;
A time to mourn,
And a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones,
And a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace,
And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain,
And a time to lose;
A time to keep,
And a time to throw away;
A time to tear,
And a time to sew;
A time to keep silence,
And a time to speak;
A time to love,
And a time to hate;
A time of war,
And a time of peace."
Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 (NKJV)
Solomon gives a sweeping look at the seasons of life most humans are left to grapple with. In the end, these seasons teach the same lessons that the natural seasons teach us. We can prepare, but we cannot prevent. We can participate, but we cannot command. We can only learn to dance to a rhythm we did not choose.
As Derek Kidner summarizes it:
“Whatever may be our skill and initiative, our real masters seem to be these inexorable seasons: not only those of the calendar, but that tide of events which moves us now to one kind of action which seems fitting, now to another which puts all into reverse.”
Nature reinforces this inevitable schedule of the grace of God.
No one negotiates the day of their birth.
No one chooses fortune’s kiss or poverty’s scowl.
And n o one holds summer in place or drives away the cold of winter.
The earth simply turns.
Light shifts.
The temperature changes.
And life moves with it.
Ecclesiastes 3 is not cruel—but it is honest.
It does not flatten our grief,
and it does not rush our joy.
It simply names what is true:
life is lived in movements we do not fully control, yet none of it unfolds outside the care of God.
There will be seasons when nothing you plant seems to grow.
There will be seasons when what you built must be torn down.
Seasons when words fail.
Seasons when silence becomes your only prayer.
And still—
God remains present.
We do not lose agency in the rising tide of changing seasons; we gain it through how we navigate their seas.
No one is able to choose the seasons that life brings, however, we can all choose to receive and live richly in the life we have been given.
The nation of Israel knew this well. They found themselves in a season of silence. For four hundred years they longed for the Advent of their Savior. And while many were looking for Him to arrive with thunder and triumph, the Messiah slipped quietly through the back door of Bethlehem.
We too, stand in the cold with ancient Israel, longing for light.
We sit in the tension between promise and fulfillment.
We shelter fragile hope from the hard heat of reality.
The arrival of Christ reminds us that even when the season is dark, God is still at work beneath the soil.
Nature reminds us that roots take hold where no one can see.
Life prepares itself in hidden places and the world turns—slowly, faithfully—toward joy.
And sometimes, that turning happens a world away as God moves the hearts of kings and unifies families against all odds and through all seasons.
Whether we find ourselves in a time of mourning or dancing we have this hope as an anchor:
Waiting can be worship
Hoping can be holy
Our seasons are filled with purpose.