“For everything there is a season,” wrote the preacher in our reading from Ecclesiastes, “a time for every matter under heaven.”
There was a time for Pat Hider to be born and we’re glad for that, and there was a time for Pat Hider to die (as there will be for all of us, unless the LORD returns first) but that we don’t like so much.
There’s nothing we can do to influence the time God chooses for us to be born and there’s very little we can do to reschedule our time to die. Although we may have some issues over the timing of the latter, for the most part we just have to accept God’s timing. Although we may not have much control over the way we die, we do have some considerable control over the way we live our lives and how well we prepare ourselves for that inevitable event; in other words, by how we deal with the things we heard about in the first reading that happen between the two: the planting, how we uproot that, what we kill and why, the healing, what we break down and build up, the weeping, the laughing (with or at), the mourning, the dancing, the scattering and gathering of the stones in our lives, the embracing, the refraining from embracing, the seeking, the losing, the keeping, the throwing away, the tearing apart and the mending, the keeping silence, the speaking, the loving and the hating, the warring and peacemaking.
Pat handled all that pretty well despite circumstances which would have defeated many of us and which could, oh so easily, have slipped into self pity, anger and bitterness. Read more…
Tweet this!
Recent Comments