Tag Archives: Ecclesiastes

Your Homework: What to Set Aside

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

Genesis 2:1-3 (NRSV)

God was the first to intentionally set aside time. After six days of creating, the seventh day was set aside as a time to rest, disrupting the steady flow of one day spilling into the next.

Have you noticed how one day spills into the next? One week turns into the next one? The years run together.

God’s intentionality in the early moments of creation deserves our attention. God did not let the days run together, instead God set one of them aside. Just one.

It could not have been easy. God had plenty more work to do, and yet God set aside time to rest and then blessed that day. It is so wild that even God needed rest! But God did. To make rest happen, God was purposefully set some aside.

If you look ahead to the days and weeks on your calendar, can you set aside a time to rest? Can you schedule a two-hour block to visit with a friend and go for a walk by yourself? Can you find a day to hang out and relax with your favorite people? Is there a weekend you might block off for a mini-vacation?

Typically, these things do not magically happen, they require setting aside time before the days and weeks spill into one another.

Long before 21st century busyness, the writer of Ecclesiastes devoted most of a chapter to time. He argued there is enough time for what matters.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NRSV)

The same is true for you. There is a time for every matter that matters in your life. So here is your homework: Set the time aside, like God’s seventh day, and let it be a blessing.

Photo by Malvestida on Unsplash

You Need More Than a To-Do List

“For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under heaven.”

Ecclesiastes 3:1

This verse has been rattling around in my brain. It is the upcoming Scripture reading in the Narrative Lectionary, one of the readings for a wedding tomorrow, and the passage I shared earlier this week for chapel at the nursing homes.

Yet even without those connections, Ecclesiastes’ words hit home in August. For many of us, this is the season of school shopping and new schedules. The matters under heaven have to do with bus stops and books, phones and friends.

Last night I had a mini-date with my planner, where the seasons and matters under heaven are written.* Paging through the symmetry of the days and weeks, you can see Ecclesiastes is right – there is a box on the page for every matter. The seasons fit onto pages. We move from one box to the next, one page at a time. There is a sense of peace in seeing what comes next, at least according to what we’ve written out.

In Ecclesiastes, chapter three, he writes out the seasons as though he is constructing a planner page. There is a time for this and a time for that – a box, a page, a space. But his planner pages have no registration deadlines or meetings or medical appointments or early release days! In chapter three, there is more of a to-be list than a to-do list. The boxes and pages of the planner Ecclesiastes is writing contain instructions for how to be human.

  • One day you, you will laugh and be filled with joy. On another day, there will be time to weep.
  • In this space of time, be sure to keep silent, and over on this day speak up.
  • Take time here to dance, and take time there to mourn.

Does your planner remind you simply to be, amid all there is to do? In the busyness of the days and weeks, do you remember to laugh, weep, stay silent or speak? Is there a day for dancing and a day for mourning?

And whose planner is it, I might add? We can look at the days to come with only our best guesses. It is less of a planner and more of a guesser…which still won’t stop me from having a mini-date with my planner because it’s one of my favorite things.

But like most aspects of our lives, if we hold on too tightly, we miss what is important. With our eyes glued to the planner (or the guesser) we cannot also see what will make us laugh, or weep, or leave us speechless or emboldened to speak. The planner will tell you what to do, and Ecclesiastes will remind you to be.

If the upcoming months feel full, how might you remind your future self to take a moment in the mayhem to keep company with Jesus?

*If you are a person who nerds out over planning and planners enough to have a date with your planner, you might also find wisdom from Sarah Hart-Unger.

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash

Parenting is Both Loving and Not Caring

(Photo by Christopher Beloch on Unsplash)

Kid: “Mom, blah blah blah.”

Mom: “I don’t care. But I do love you!”

Doesn’t that feel good? Not caring can feel so dang good! I don’t care about a lot of things. I don’t care if if I catch the news every day or if I’m a few minutes late for some things. Okay, for several things! And it’s not just me. My husband doesn’t care about the laundry on the floor or if the bed never ever ever gets made again.

I don’t care if my kids earn perfect grades or become impressive athletes. I don’t care if they stop going to church or never leisurely read another book. I will never stop loving these three young humans, but I will never care about absolutely everything they do or do not do.

Like two sides of the same coin, love and not caring go together. You could also say love and letting go, if that sits better. Or, parenting is as much hands off as it is hands on. No matter the words, this work is not for the faint of heart! It may be easy to love our own kid (most of the time), but it is a great challenge to know when not to care.

Straight up, here is the importance of not caring: you will not rest if you 100% care for every single detail of your kid’s life every moment of every day. You cannot be you, a full self, a healthy human, if all you do is care about your kid. Sometimes, it is best not to care.

Let me be clear. There are parents who literally do not care an iota, which is often related to mental health or trauma or addiction. I’m not advocating for that. Do not stop caring for your kid’s basic needs. That is not cool. This is what I mean: I am learning to care less and at times not at all when the timing is right.

Let’s start at the beginning. When a doctor hands a parent a brand new baby, or you receive a child through adoption, you do not promise to protect this child from every possible problem. You do not promise to raise that child to perfection, or become the most remarkable caregiver. Before and after becoming a parent, you are as human as ever. The writer of Ecclesiastes, perhaps the world’s first life coach, assured us there is a time for every season under heaven. I agree. There is a time to care and a time to not care.

I am slowly learning this complex parenting wisdom, which grows more complex as my kids add years to their ages. I feel it in their schoolwork, which I hope they do well and work hard and I will support them as best I can. However, as much as I love for them to do their best, it is perfectly fine that I do not care so much for the end result. I can point out their grades, but not take their work personally. I can remind them and be clear with my concerns, and after that I need to know where my own parental responsibility starts and stops. Their future is completely out of my hands, unlike when they were little.

When they were little, I chose my kids’ day cares and babysitters and often even their friends. Now, none of that is true. They will choose their post-high school path, just as they will choose their own friends. They will choose their hobbies and whether they care that they wear dirty-looking work jeans to school every dang day, making it appear that our family shops for clothes out of the trash bin outside the thrift store. Again, out of my hands.

I love them so much, and I refuse to care for all the details that shape their lives. If parenting is raising small humans to grow into independent and helpful adult humans, then at some point, I have to hand over the burden of caring so much.

Perhaps this is God’s way of loving us, too. In Isaiah 43, God loves us and we belong to God. This chapter is the only moment in the entirely of the Bible when God explicitly states: “I love you.” But like the stoic parent who does not say the words out loud every single day, you know it’s true. The absence of the words do not make the parent’s love for you any less, only quieter. From the first page of Genesis to the last page of Revelation, God’s love for you sings from each chapter.

I will fiercely love my kids as long as I live, and sometimes my love will be elevator music they can hardly hear as they learn to do life on their own. It will be there, my love for them, at times by way of quiet background noise, yet still they will know it is there. Lingering and steady; that I both love and do not care because fierce love risks stifling both our lives. The poet Rainer Rilke puts it this way: “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go, for holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”