“He has made everything beautiful in its time.”

I have thought a lot about Ecclesiastes as that’s what we’ve been reading through in our Wednesday class. (Please join in!) This is a fascinating statement from the Teacher of Ecclesiastes. On one hand, it clearly demonstrates a prevailing theme of the book: everything has its time and everything dies. Like a flower growing one day and wilting the next, each of us has our time in the sun and then we fade away and are forgotten. It is a meditation on mortality and futility and time.

I was reminded of a quote from the Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Even something good and beautiful must pass away or else it will not stay good. Each thing betrays itself in the course of time. The body betrays itself. Our institutions betray themselves. Within each thing, the seed of its ruination is hidden from its birth, and it grows until it kills its host. Anything good that goes on long enough will be corrupted and perverted. Everything is beautiful in its time. After that, it gets ugly.

But there is another way to read this statement: everything is beautiful in its time. Everything, no matter what it is, is beautiful in its time. Each thing has its moment in time to belong, to fit, to join in the grand harmony of creation in praise of its Creator. The Lord places each thing in creation where it belongs. It is the chaos which leaks in through sin that corrupts God’s perfect order, which turns time into a force of decay.

We can look forward to the time beyond the time that we know: to eternity. I think eternity must not simply be more time, but a different quality of time. It is the time where all things are beautiful, where all things belong. It is that which we experience in part when we are caught up in a rapturous moment of pure beauty: seeing the face of our child for the first time, the first drive of your first car, a first kiss. It is in those moments where time totally vanishes that I think we get our nearest glimpse of eternity. It is that moment where everything fits together and everything is beautiful that we glimpse what God made the world to be in the beginning, and once we start seeing that beauty, we start to find it again and again.

Within each thing is the glimmer of the love of the God who made it, and that makes it beautiful.

Blessings,

Michael Kennedy