A Time for Everything: Finding God’s Rhythm for Work and Rest

There is a particular sort of madness abroad in our age, and it wears the respectable clothing of virtue. It is the madness of the man who has resolved to be good, and has concluded that being good means doing the same admirable thing at every hour of his life, in every weather, without pause, without variation, and preferably while being photographed. He has mistaken goodness for a setting on a thermostat. He believes that if generosity is good, then perpetual generosity must be better, and total, unceasing, self-annihilating generosity must be best of all. He is like a farmer who, having discovered that planting is a fine thing, insists upon planting in every month of the year, and cannot understand why his fields yield nothing but exhaustion.

Against this earnest lunatic stands the strangest passage in all of Scripture: a poem, sitting in the middle of the wisdom literature, which announces with perfect calm that there is a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build up, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. The Preacher does not apologize for this. He does not soften it. He simply lays it out, like a man dealing cards, and leaves us to make of it what we will.

The Scandal of the Fourteen Pairs

We have domesticated this passage by setting it to music and printing it on wall calendars, which is our usual method of disarming anything dangerous. But read it again and notice how badly it behaves. A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. A time to seek, and a time to lose. Here is a Bible that refuses to give us the one thing we most want, which is a rule simple enough to be applied without thinking.

The modern moralist finds this intolerable. He wants a principle he can hold like a hammer and swing at every problem. Tell him that honesty is a virtue and he will become the man who informs strangers of their failings in supermarket queues. Tell him that mercy is a virtue and he will become the man who forgives on behalf of victims who have not been consulted. He has the right virtue and the wrong hour, and a virtue in the wrong hour is not a virtue at all. Courage at the wrong moment is recklessness. Silence at the wrong moment is cowardice. Zeal at the wrong moment is cruelty wearing a halo.

Let us be clear about what the Preacher is not saying, since our age is quick to hear permission where none was offered. He is not saying that there is a time for adultery and a time for fidelity, a time for theft and a time for honest labor. The moral law is not a season; it is the soil. The seasons are what happens above it. A time for everything is not the same as everything for all time, and the man who reads Ecclesiastes as a license has read it upside down. What the Preacher gives us is not the abolition of the law but the rhythm within it, the discovery that God has written our obedience not as a single sustained note but as music.

The Two Ditches

There are, as there generally are, two ways to fall off this road, and both of them are downhill.

The first ditch belongs to the perpetual harvester. He is the man who has never once suspected that rest might be a commandment rather than a concession. He serves on four committees, answers every email within the hour, and believes that any evening spent reading a novel is an evening stolen from the Kingdom. He is very tired, and he mistakes his tiredness for holiness, which is the oldest trick in the enemy's rather thin book. He has forgotten that God Himself, who could hardly have been fatigued, rested on the seventh day, and that He did so not because He needed to but because we did, and because He is in the habit of teaching by example even when the example costs Him nothing.

The second ditch belongs to the perpetual contemplative, though he would prefer to be called something else. He has read that we are saved by grace and not by works, and has concluded, with what he considers admirable logic, that works are therefore an embarrassment. He is waiting for a leading. He has been waiting for some years. He speaks warmly of letting go and letting God, generally while letting go of things God had rather plainly placed in his hands. He is not resting; he is idling, and the difference between the two is the difference between a bow unstrung and a bow that has never been strung at all.

The Preacher stands between these two ditches and points out, with the patience of a man who has watched a great many people fall into both, that there is a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted, and that the wise man is the one who can tell which is which.

The Man Who Kept the Seasons Perfectly

If we want to see this lived rather than argued, we have only one place to look.

Christ wept at the tomb of Lazarus, though He knew perfectly well that within the quarter hour the man would be walking about and asking for something to eat. He did not skip the weeping because the laughing was coming. There was a time to weep, and He kept it. He was silent before Pilate, who held His life in his hands and would have been delighted by an argument, and He made a whip of cords in the temple, where a lesser man would have written a strongly worded letter. He withdrew to the mountain to pray when the crowds most wanted Him, and He walked straight into Jerusalem when every friend He had was begging Him to withdraw.

We call this obedience, and it was. But notice that it was also timing. The Son of God did not merely do right things; He did them at the hour appointed, and He did not do them at any other hour. When His mother suggested the wine at Cana, He observed that His time had not yet come, and then, in a gesture that has puzzled the commentators for two thousand years, He went ahead and did it anyway, because there is also a time for a mother to be listened to.

The saints inherited this. Benedict built an entire civilization on the ringing of a bell that told his monks when to pray and when to stop praying and go dig the garden, and the world has never quite recovered from how well it worked. Martha was not rebuked for cooking; she was rebuked for cooking during a sermon. Her sister was praised not for idleness but for accuracy. Mary had chosen the good portion, and what made it good was substantially that she had chosen it then.

But How Does One Know?

Here we arrive at the honest difficulty, and I will not pretend to solve it in a paragraph. Ecclesiastes offers us no formula, and we should suspect anyone who does. What it offers instead is a warning and a comfort, sitting side by side in a single verse: God has made everything beautiful in its time, and He has also put eternity into the human heart, so that we cannot find out what He is doing from beginning to end.

That is the ache we all carry. We are given eternity enough to know that our moments matter, and not nearly enough to see the pattern they make. We are asked to dance without being shown the choreography.

So we discern the way people have always discerned. We pray, which is chiefly the practice of asking what hour it is rather than announcing what we intend to do with it. We consult those who love us enough to tell us the truth, since a man is generally the last to notice which season he is stuck in. We look at our fatigue and our appetites and our neglected obligations, and we read them as a farmer reads the sky. And we accept that we will get it wrong often enough to keep us humble, and that grace covers a great many mistimings.

What Ecclesiastes commends at the end of it all is almost comically modest. Eat your bread. Drink your wine. Find enjoyment in your toil, for this is the gift of God. After all that talk of killing and healing and casting away stones, the Preacher's counsel is that you should have your dinner and be glad of it. This is not resignation. It is the deepest sanity available to a creature who cannot see the whole design: to do today's good today, and to leave tomorrow's good for tomorrow, when it will be in season.

The Last Pair

There is one more thing to notice in that catalogue of times, and it is the one we skip past fastest. It begins with a time to be born and a time to die, and the Preacher puts it first, because everything else in the list is bracketed by those two.

Every season in the poem turns and returns. The weeping gives way to laughing and the laughing gives way to weeping, and the wheel goes round, and the Preacher watched it go round until he was heartily sick of it. Only one pair does not repeat. We are born once and we die once, and there the music stops.

Or it did. Because the whole scandalous claim of the Christian faith is that a man once stepped into that final, unrepeating pair and came out the other side of it, and in doing so turned the last season into a doorway. There is a time to die, yes. But it is no longer the end of the calendar. It is merely the last hour of a very long day, after which there is a morning that keeps no seasons at all, because it has no need of them.

Until then, we live in the turning year. We work and we rest, we speak and we hold our tongues, we build and we let go, trying to keep the beat. Balance was never standing still in the middle. Balance is knowing which foot to move, and moving it, and trusting that Someone is calling the dance.

~The Seeker's Quill