Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
I’m reminded of all the journeying to and fro that comes with summertime. People going on vacation, college students coming and leaving, teachers emptying their classrooms. Even the upcoming change for my family as we return to the Seminary. This summer I am reminded of impermanence and how the world continually changes.
Whether you’re heading off somewhere this summer or having new experiences with this change of season, things don’t remain the same as they once were. Time marches on, and life shifts and churns. Sometimes these shifts bring about blessings and reprieve from challenges of the past. At other times, they bring difficulties and even suffering. Births, deaths, baptisms, new opportunities, job changes, moving states, disease, marriages, these are just a small sample of life’s changes that come at you. And they come ceaselessly, both as blessing and as affliction.
Solomon sums this up in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (v. 1-8):
“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 kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.”
And in what appears to be an ever-shifting and changing world, how do we stay centered, at peace, and content? Solomon continues in verse fourteen:
“I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.”
The work of God lasts forever and does not fail. It does not shift or change or churn. Mountaintops can make way to valleys and lakes and oceans become empty craters, the whole face of the earth could change, and God and his work would remain. Every last nation could be overturned but God and His kingdom persist eternally.
Very much unlike our own lives that twist and turn in every direction. Yet, God is our constant. Even as we go through our twists that afflict us and the turns that bless us, God and His work remains the same. And the greatest work, the saving death of Jesus Christ for our salvation, can never be shifted, moved, or taken away. But what God has done in Jesus lasts forever. We live with our feet planted firmly on the rock, Jesus, who doesn’t crumble like sand. And by His strength and His Holy Spirit, we continue into summertime and all of life’s many changes in His saving grace.
In Christ,
Vicar Lewis