“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted… a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4)
This passage doesn’t rank the seasons — it doesn’t say the dancing seasons are good and the mourning ones are a mistake to be gotten through quickly. It treats them as equally legitimate, equally part of “a time,” each with its own place under heaven.
There’s a real temptation to treat only the “good” seasons — laughing, dancing, gathering — as the seasons worth being fully present in, while rushing through or resenting the weeping and mourning ones as obstacles to get past. Ecclesiastes refuses that hierarchy. A time to weep is still A TIME — not a malfunction in the schedule, not a detour from real life, but genuinely part of it.
This can be a strange comfort in a hard season: you’re not doing life wrong because it’s currently a “time to mourn” instead of a “time to dance.” Both are seasons, and both, eventually, pass into the next one.
Reflect: What season are you actually in right now, and have you been resisting it instead of letting it be what it is?
Prayer: Lord, help me be present in this season, whatever it is, trusting that you hold the timing of every one. Amen.