The Cycle
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: Ecclesiastes 3:1 NIV
Season – Actually, the Hebrew doesn’t use the word for “season.” It uses ʿēt, meaning “time”—a time for every activity. Where the NIV translates “There is a time,” the Hebrew text uses zĕmān, an “appointed time.” But we understand the message. Change! Everything changes. And the older we get, the more we notice. I look at those pictures of my children when they were five and six. So beautiful. So full of possibility. So much life. Thirty years later, I still wish I could hold them again, read a bedtime story, feel their breath against my cheek.
Change! It sneaks up on us. A little at a time, and before you know it . . . Well, we’re left with a memory. So I thought to write something about this—something from the expected change that’s coming. Something about this picture:
The birth is beautiful – subtle pastels spattered across nature’s canvas as Spring arrives. Vibrant expectations of new life – frenzied, ferocious, fatal flaws in the inevitable march toward ordinary green – everywhere.
Dramatic gasps of color, splashing from every bush and tree, shouting against the coming night, released from Summer’s green bondage by encroaching cold. A last hurrah. A final plea for recognition. Once ignored in crenellated green, now exploding in irresistible organic fireworks, demanding that we look before it’s too late.
And gone, anthocyanin despair stumbles into the graveyard of creation. Sticks raising their naked, agonizing prayers to heaven in hopes that one day, some day, they will be clothed again.
Topical Index: change, time, ʿēt, zĕmān, Ecclesiastes 3:1
Yeshua HaMashiach is the goal and completion and fulfillment of the cycle.
And he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything that is written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and would rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and the forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending out what was promised by my Father upon you, but you… remain… until you are clothed with power from on high.”
And he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands, he blessed them. And it happened that while he was blessing them, he parted from them and was taken up into heaven. (Luke 44-51)
“Sticks raising their naked, agonizing prayers to heaven in hopes that one day, some day, they will be clothed again.”
Job 19:26 “Even after my skin is destroyed,
Yet from my flesh I shall see God;”