The Changing Seasons of Life

Fall is my favorite time of the year.  At least in the fall!  I actually love all of the seasons and am blessed to live in a part of the country where there are four very distinct seasons.  The older I get, the more I enjoy the change of seasons.  It reminds me so much of life.

Football season has arrived (not one of the four, but important nevertheless).  Soon the leaves will begin to change here in East Tennessee.  The foothills will be alive with color.  And then they will be gone, and another season will come.  

It is interesting that this is the word God chose to use to describe all of life.  “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1).  More than 65 verses in Scripture refer to seasons.  Seasons are God’s measurement of the stages of life.

• Every thing has a season.

Beginning in Genesis 1:14 God Himself started setting the seasons.  And He still does.  There are seasons of joy and of sorrow.  Seasons of labor and of rest.  Seasons of calm and of storms.  An all-wise God changes the seasons as He sees best (Daniel 2:21).

Watching my children grow up is a constant reminder that nothing stays the same…except God.  Seasons of life change but the Lord of life does not.

• Every season has a purpose.

Seasons provide what the earth needs at a particular time, and prepares the earth for the next season.  We could not stay in summer forever and we would not stay in winter forever!  And so it is with life.  We need what God has for us in every season!

Some seasons seem to go so quickly; others seem to hang on forever.  Stop enduring the season you are in and see God at work in it…

• Every purpose has an end.

The same passage in Ecclesiastes concludes, “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time” (vs. 11).  His time.  His purpose.  His season.

Someday the seasons will stop changing and we will enter one endless season of glory.  All will be beautiful then and we will understand more about every season He allowed us to go through.

“Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations” (1 Peter 1:6).

“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:9).