There is a time for everything - a season for every activity under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3 v1.
Just recently I have had cause to turn to the well known reading from Ecclesiastes, writes Wendy Coxhill. When my Mother died a couple of months ago it was one of the readings I chose for her funeral. Verse 2 says “a time to be born and a time to die”. I felt it was time for Mum to die as she had been suffering from Alzheimers for several years and her death was a release from this suffering. The poignancy of this verse was brought home to me when five days after Mum’s death Myla Grace Campbell entered the world. As I looked at this perfect little girl it made me realize that God does make our lives a time of seasons and opportunities.
The seasons come round again but opportunities may not. Being born and dying are things we do only once and about which we have no choice. For other things - planting and building - we must choose the right moment for success. As I write this I am preparing for St. Luke’s awayday and I can’t help feeling that the opportunity to be in the Farmers’ Market was given to us by God because it was His time for us to move on. Other actions and reactions must be appropriate to a relationship or circumstance: to kill or to cure, to break or to mend, to make love or wage war. God has given us this context of rhythm and reliability, crisis and change. We take our place in an unfolding drama and purpose, having missed the beginning and being unable to guess the end.
We have our defining moments of usefulness or success, but our contribution is tiny and brief. It is God who knows the purpose and sees the whole. It is His work alone that endures. Although we are confined by time and circumstance, a door is opened to freedom in the present. Food and drink and all the varied activities of daily life are God’s good gifts. When our life engages with God’s love we experience something of eternal value.
Wendy Coxhill
Return to Index for the Parish of Walthamstow Magazine, July/August 2008
