I find great beauty in Creation’s cyclical changes.
Night becomes day. Low tides, high tides. Growing seasons and not.
Here in the Upper Midwest, there generally are noticeable differences among our seasons. And now you feel it: The sun is losing its power, the evenings aren’t as long, a crispness to the early morning air.
Look around and you’ll see the cyclical nature of things, both living and not. And I find it comforting. After all, doesn’t King Solomon remind us in Ecclesiastes 3:15 that everything has its time?
There are seasons in the church calendar as well.
This week, our congregation returns to a normal schedule of Sunday morning worships. And we celebrate this change in season in our annual rite of passage known as Rally Sunday.
During service we’ll install our Sunday school teachers for the year, bless our children as they return to school and lift up the many others who will fulfill vital roles in our congregation this year.
And special to us this particular Rally Sunday will be a baptism! What a joyous way to ring in our new church year.
A time for everything. The scriptures tell us so.
Maybe it’s the movement toward autumn that has me waxing philosophically as of late. But with recent changes in career and a more fully developed sense of pastoral call over the last year, I can’t help but to appreciate that there is our time, and then there is the Creator’s time. Most often, in my experience, the two generally do not align. We’re often too busy trying to push or pull God’s timeline to our liking to be able to step back to look at the interwovenness of things.
But, if we slow down and open our ears, eyes and hearts -- well, it’s a little easier to detect that there is a more universal force at play. Both in our own lives, and in the natural world around us.
However, to do so means that we no longer can be the center of creation. Rather, we must recognize that we are just a part of the larger cosmic design.
A time for everything. The scriptures tell us so.
Friends, I’m not sure what season you’re in. Maybe it’s a joyous place like we are in our congregation, celebrating a return to the church year. Or maybe you are in a place of heartbreak like some of my loved ones are after losing someone dear to them. Or, maybe just somewhere in between in a liminal space.
Wherever you find yourself today, I hope that you too take comfort in knowing that there is our time, and then there is God’s time -- during which there is a time for everything.
May that bring you peace. Amen.
Devlyn Brooks is the interim CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at [email protected].