At the store today we were greeted by a sign that wished us all a Merry Christmas. My daughter asked, “Are we skipping Thanksgiving?” I told her that we almost skipped Halloween – the Christmas holiday commercials have already begun.
Today’s passage is the start of a very familiar reading from Ecclesiastes 3, a statement about life. What does the first verse tell us? What specific times are mentioned in verse 2?
Although we do not as a family have exact dates when it is time for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and so on, we do have an order to our lives. We often find it amusing when folks put up their Christmas decorations in early November only to leave them up well into March. It seems a blurring of the seasons, a refusal to allow the holiday to fade.
As pointed out in Ecclesiastes there is an order to life. There is a time for all things. We will experience a time of growth, a time of rest, a time of joy and a time of sorrows. That is life. There is a rhythm to it, a flow, an order.
We are currently in a time of harvest. We are seeing the local farmers gathering in their crops and personally we are preparing ourselves and our home for the fast-approaching winter months and all the activities that involves.
Our faith life has its seasons as well. There is a time of renewal in our spirits, a time of confidence and security, a time of doubt, and also a time of struggle. We are given times of joy from God, but we also must prepare ourselves for times of sacrifice and times of loss.
We are called on by God to give offerings to the Lord and the Bible also gives us guidance in the offerings we are to give to God. For the next several weeks we will be examining three types of offerings mentioned in Leviticus – the burnt offering, the grain offering and the fellowship offering.
DAILY CHALLENGE: How can you remember that God is the Lord of all seasons?
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