Sunday Preview: Know Your Season, Know Your Reason
September 16th, 2014 | John Chandler
Here are three reasons you might loose a night’s sleep:
- A crying newborn won’t let you sleep
- A major exam is tomorrow and you’re cramming
- You are miserable and depressed because you don’t know what to do with your life.
Many of us wish that we had a grand sense of purpose. We want to know clearly and specifically what our vocation is.
More realistically, we get caught up in our unavoidable day-to-day life. We don’t have a lot of time to spend articulating a grand vocation when there are poopy diapers to change or quarterly reports to fill out.
What if there was a way to understand #1 & #2 as our vocation?
Both nature and scripture help us back out from this trap. Spring has clear seasons, where obvious things happen. In spring, babies are born and leaves sprout on trees. In Autumn, leaves fall off and crops are harvested. This is normal and natural, because, of course, it is seasonal. Scripture riffs off the ideas of seasons, most famously in Ecclesiastes 3:
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
As we continue in our discussion of Sacred Time, we’ll discuss how we orient our life to vocation by organizing our life around seasons.
In other words, know your reason, know your season.