Read Ecclesiastes 3:1 – ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.’
For many children and young people, this is the last week of the summer term. Some students may have finished their university careers or will soon be enjoying a summer break. Others, depending on their stage of life, may have left school in the last few days.
It is a long time since I left school, and then, a few years later, college. But I still clearly remember the year I left college. I was driving from my home at the time to visit a friend in the southern counties, making my way across Tower Bridge and down through Brixton to pick up the A3.
It was the time of the Brixton riots. We look back on events like that, memorable for the wrong reasons, and are reminded that the time of year we often associate with tranquillity is not always tranquil.
Endings are important for all of us, not simply because we want to finish things, but because breaks in work, changes in direction, and new starts all need a signal if they are really to happen.
So the quiet significance of endings — like the close of a term in the academic year, or the simple end of a year of work before a summer holiday with the family — stands out as an important landmark in our personal calendars.
If you read Ecclesiastes 3 more widely, you quickly realise that the writer covers a lot of ground. He spells out many of the different starts and finishes that matter to us all: times of planting and uprooting, mourning and dancing, keeping and letting go.
As you prepare for summer, whatever it holds for you — family holidays, no holidays, or a few weeks of frenetic activity looking after children or grandchildren — remember that these landmarks are important. They remind us of the rhythms originally ordained by God: decline and renewal, starts and finishes, work and rest.
A Prayer:
God, you set in place times and seasons, decline and renewal, starts and finishes. We thank you for all of that, and we pray that you will bless to us the use of the summer, whatever we are enabled to do with it. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.