This weekend we celebrated harvest festival, thanking God for His blessing and generosity. Harvest marks the changing of the seasons from summer to autumn, which itself feels like a season of change. There are the visible signs of change in nature – leaves turning from green to orange, the evenings turning darker. There is change as the academic year gets underway, summer sports seasons end and winter sports seasons start. As someone who married at harvest festival, left student life behind and started my first proper job in October (all in one year), and a few years later had my first child in November, autumn feels like a season of momentous change or the anniversaries of momentous change.
Change can be exciting but it can also be daunting.
Change can be full of new opportunities but also letting go of things we treasure.
Change can be much anticipated and welcome, or unexpected and unwelcome.
Change can energise or exhaust us.
However we feel about change (and that itself can change), we know that some things never change; God is with us through it all, working His purpose out in our lives. As the passage from Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time for everything and our lives do change. But in the later verses we are reminded of God’s presence in the past, present and future. We can give praise and thanks for all that God has done in our lives, still ourselves before Him now, and trust that He will guide us in what lies ahead.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up 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 throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-6, 14-15