Read
Everything Has Its Time
1Everything on earth
has its own time
and its own season.
2There is a time
for birth and death,
planting and reaping,
3for killing and healing,
destroying and building,
4for crying and laughing,
weeping and dancing,
5for throwing stones
and gathering stones,
embracing and parting.
6There is a time
for finding and losing,
keeping and giving,
7for tearing and sewing,
listening and speaking.
8There is also a time
for love and hate,
for war and peace.
What God
9What do we gain by all our hard work? 10I have seen what difficult things God demands of us. 11God makes everything happen at the right time. Yet none of us can ever fully understand all he has done, and he puts questions in our minds about the past and the future. 12I know the best thing we can do is to always enjoy life, 13because God's gift to us is the happiness we get from our food and drink and from the work we do. 14Everything God has done will last forever; nothing he does can ever be changed. God has done all this, so that we will worship him.
15Everything that happens
has happened before,
and all that will be
has already been—
God does everything
over and over again.
Reflect
The world that is, is not what was intended to be. We were meant to eat without having to wrestle our bread from the earth, to build without breaking our bodies to do it, to love without our hearts being broken. But the world was warped and broken by sin, and all things were bent away from their original intention. Death crept in through the cracks that had opened in the universe, and with it came things that were never meant to be: sickness and war, and famine and disease.
Although God hated these things, he could not remove them from the world without nullifying the choices that his people had made, from which these things came. He would not take away our free will and make us slaves, unknowing and unquestioning. He would not delete any good thing from his perfect creation. Instead of erasing, the Artist took up his tools again and continued to create.
He continued to shape his bent creation until the ruined shapes of the things he made began to form patterns new and even more beautiful than they had been. Where he found war, he made courage and self-sacrifice. Where he found hunger and rocky soil, he made perseverance and creativity. Where he found sickness and broken bodies, he made compassion and empathy. Where he found sin and death and separation, he made a bridge with his own broken body.
Where a straight line had been tangled, he wove a Celtic knot. Where the mirror was broken, he made a mosaic. In every corner of his wounded world he crafted a new rightness and fitness out of what had been made wrong. He has made a time for everything, and he has made all things beautiful in their time.
Respond
Dear Father God, You are making all things new. Renew the bent and broken bits of myself today, that I might become who you intended me to be and have a part in your work redeeming our world. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Mike Bonikowsky
Mike Bonikowsky began looking at books as soon as he could sit up. Eventually he learned to read them, and has not been able to stop. One day he realized that people wrote the words in the books, and he began to write his own. He has not been able to stop that either. He lives with his wife and child in Melancthon Township, Ontario, where he writes his words in the basement.