When This Season Ends: How to Let Good Things Go

“You are living the very best times of your existence.”

The comment caught my wife off guard. She was carting our two younger boys towards the grocery-retail store checkout when an more mature lady ventured the prophecy. The female spoke from working experience, as a mother whose possess cart experienced as soon as held minimal types. Potentially she noticed in my spouse a earlier edition of herself. Potentially our boys brought back again dear reminiscences. Both way, she felt stirred to discuss from hindsight: “You are residing the ideal times of your lifestyle.”

My wife and I experience the reality of her terms. Even amid the chaos of these very little many years, we normally catch glimpses of what life will be like when our house no longer hears the patter of tiny toes or the laughter of minor voices. We won’t be surprised if we appear back on these decades — these wild, exhausting, fantastic a long time — as the sweetest of our lives. We also will not be astonished if they depart sooner than we’d like.

Times like this one particular in the grocery shop have still left me questioning how to are living via important days you know will go away. How, as Christians, should really we check out children mature, tables vacant, friendships fade, faces wrinkle?

Every Excellent Year Will Stop

In a planet of alter and decay, great items are fleeting by mother nature. Young ones get large and hair turns gray. Honeymoons move and anniversaries insert up. Good ministries conclude and new beginnings swiftly develop into old. These details are so noticeable, so unavoidable, that you’d believe we’d be additional ready for them.

But something in us — a little something in me — attempts to deny the apparent and outrun the unavoidable. We, of course, have designed a dozen ways and extra we try to dam the River Time. Some consider photos: numerous photos, gorgeous photos, images to freeze and body our joy. Some test to choreograph moments intended to be relished, not organized. Some come to be relationally clingy. Some treat their small children as if they have been many a long time youthful than they are. I in some cases come across myself making an attempt to lengthen times for a longer period than they must go, like a man who keeps shouting “Encore!” immediately after the band has long gone dwelling.

These impulses normally occur from a kind of anticipated nostalgia, an consciousness of present gifts we can not bear to visualize as past, as long gone. So we keep a web more than our brightest days, striving to catch the butterfly of lasting joy in the fields of time. But the holes are always way too major. No issue how significantly we try out, we are not able to seize very good seasons from the self-importance of our Ecclesiastes environment, where “there is no enduring remembrance, observing that in the times to appear all will have been extended forgotten” (Ecclesiastes 2:16).

No, we cannot cease the breezes that have away our very best moments. But we can understand to are living far more wisely in the wind.

The Hand That Holds Our Seasons

The brevity of attractive seasons can seem like a form of cruelty. And in some means, of program, our losses do remind us of our fallen good deal, that we dwell in a land wherever very good issues die. Our seasons, like our selves, go from dust to dust, the casualties of a sin-cursed planet, subjected to futility (Romans 8:20). But for God’s people today, Scripture would have us see our passing seasons differently. In the end, time does not take our very best times from us God does (Position 1:21). And as a result, wisdom will come from viewing the hand that holds our seasons.

“For all the things there is a time, and a time for each and every matter under heaven,” the Preacher tells us (Ecclesiastes 3:1). And God is the one who has created it so. “He has made every little thing wonderful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He offers seasons of joy and gladness, seasons for holding and laughing. But on this side of heaven, he provides none of these seasons endlessly. In his tender and merciful timing, the giver of “every good gift” usually takes back the treasures he lent, reminding us that they never ever definitely belonged to us (James 1:17). Like beams from the sun, our seasons ended up not ours to have.

All those who get their seasons from God’s hand, and continue being completely ready to relinquish them at his bidding, uncover a counterintuitive variety of freedom. The far more all set we are to component with excellent items, the fewer nervous we are about shedding them, and the extra ready we are to love them. Soon after imagining his very best seasons extensive long gone, the Preacher tells us, “There is nothing at all better for a individual than that he need to try to eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God” (Ecclesiastes 2:24).

Or as David Gibson writes, “Instead of employing these items as a means to a larger stop of securing ultimate attain in the globe, we consider the time to live inside the gifts by themselves and see the hand of God in them” (Living Lifetime Backward, 45). The intelligent see the hand of God in their finest seasons they also see their ideal seasons in the hand of God. “My occasions are in your hand,” the psalmist claims (Psalm 31:15). And if our moments are in God’s hand — his fantastic, smart, type hand — then we don’t need to have to check out to hold them in ours.

Stamping Time with Eternity

But we can say much more. And indeed, on this facet of the cross and vacant tomb, soon after Jesus has “brought everyday living and immortality to mild via the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10), we can not aid but say additional. We may possibly dwell in an Ecclesiastes world, but we are headed for a planet without vainness, futility, or decline. And while we are not able to keep our seasons from slipping away from us right here, Scripture offers us hope that we can stamp them with eternity. “Only 1 lifetime, ’twill shortly be past only what is performed for Christ will last” — but what’s performed for Christ will very last.

The apostle Paul whispers of the ponder. “In the Lord,” he tells the Corinthians, “your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58) — not destined for vainness, not swept away by the wind. Or as he writes to the Ephesians, “Whatever excellent any individual does, this he will obtain again from the Lord” (Ephesians 6:8). Fantastic will work finished for Christ, good seasons lived wholly to Christ, do not remain absent. Our hands are unable to catch the passing moments, but Jesus’s can. Hence, each individual minute given to him will come to be a thing additional than passing.

Present items must die. But if they die in Christ, they will have a resurrection of sorts. The seasons will not return to us the exact same (as if we could dad or mum toddlers again in glory), but “whatever good” we’ve accomplished in these seasons will be remembered, rewarded, memorialized like a brick of gold on the streets of the New Jerusalem.

Gerrit Scott Dawson puts the issue poignantly in his ebook on Jesus’s ascension. If Jesus, the firstfruits from the dead, definitely reigns in deathless everyday living, then for individuals united to him,

Absolutely nothing good in our humanity is misplaced. The memory of a body that is effective in wellbeing is a lot more than recollection: it is now anticipation. The ache of genuine love as soon as acknowledged but now sundered will be crammed with wonderful reunion. The feeling of the distant memory of Beauty, the great of Real truth in a fallen globe, the longing for Goodness that surfaces amidst the choking thorns of our wickedness, all these will discover achievement when the firstfruits comes to harvest. (Jesus Ascended, 113)

Time may have pushed our best times from us, but “God seeks what has been driven away” (Ecclesiastes 3:15). And he is familiar with how to give back the finest of our seasons — only now significantly far better.

Aching for Heaven

Potentially you uncover you in cherished times you know will pass. You sense the sand slipping through your fingers. You see the moss beginning to improve about your happiest times. A handful of days additional, and you will sit beneath a leafless tree, the period previous and long gone. But then a several times right after that, those people in Christ will uncover on their own in a time that will in no way stop.

Now, heaven’s eternal time will not be static. Nonetheless considerably we discover of God, the shoreline of his perfections will at any time bend more than the horizon, always as “immeasurable” as before (Ephesians 2:7). But somehow, the stream of eternity will roll on with out carrying absent just about anything superior, devoid of ever reintroducing mourning, crying, or ache (Revelation 21:4). We will delight in adjust with out parting, progress devoid of reduction, a period with out unhappiness.

I have been wondering, then, if I might stay far more heavenly minded if I uncovered to read through my aches rightly. For when I really feel time managing faster than I can observe, what I’m genuinely yearning for is life with Jesus. And the issue I ought to seriously check with is this: If even this fallen environment holds times as precious as these, what will eternity with him be like?

Each individual excellent period will come to an finish, but only for now. So when the thought creeps in, “You are living some of the finest times of your lifestyle,” we can react, “Maybe of this daily life. But significantly greater days will begin when this lifetime ends.”