DEC 31 | The Weight of Every Season | Ecclesiastes 3
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
— Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (NIV)
The year ends not with a shout but with a hush. You stand at the edge of December, and behind you stretches a road you cannot walk again. The Preacher knew this moment. He carved it into verse three thousand years ago, and the words have outlived every empire that has tried to outrun them.
There is a time for everything.
Read it slowly. Let your eye catch on the weight of it. Not "a time for some things." Not "a time for the good things." A time for everything. The Preacher sets the opposites side by side—birth and death, planting and uprooting, weeping and laughing—and he refuses to rank them. He simply lets them stand, like stones stacked one upon another, marking the path of a life lived under heaven.
This is not a comfort verse. Or rather, it is not only a comfort verse. It is also a confrontation. Because buried in the center of this poem is a phrase that asks something of us: "a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them."
In the ancient world, stones were scattered to ruin a field, to make it unworkable. And stones were gathered to build—a house, a wall, an altar. The scattering and the gathering both belonged to the rhythm of life. Sometimes the field needed to lie fallow. Sometimes the altar needed to be built. The wisdom was knowing which season you stood in.
Tonight, as the year turns, you are gathering stones. Not building yet—just gathering. Picking up the pieces of twelve months and holding them in your hands. Some are smooth, worn down by grace. Some are jagged, still sharp with grief. The Preacher does not tell you to throw the jagged ones away. He simply says: this is the time to gather them.
There is a strange dignity in this. The world will tell you to move on, to leave the hard year behind, to manufacture optimism like confetti. But the Preacher offers something older and truer: the acknowledgment that every season has weight. That the time for mourning is not a failure but a season with its own appointed purpose. That the losses you carry are not embarrassments to be hidden but stones that mark the ground you have walked.
Notice what the Preacher does not say. He does not say there is a time for winning. He says there is a time for losing. He does not say there is a time for answers. He says there is a time for silence. This is not cynicism. It is the kind of honesty that makes hope possible—because hope that pretends away the darkness is no hope at all.
The Hebrew word for "time" here is eth. It does not mean clock-time, the seconds ticking away. It means the right time, the appointed moment, the season that fits. God has set eternity in our hearts, the Preacher will say a few verses later, yet we cannot fathom what He has done from beginning to end. We stand inside time, unable to see the full shape of the story. But the Preacher insists: there is a shape. Every season has its place in something larger than we can see.
So here you stand, at the hinge of the year, holding your gathered stones. What will you do with them?
You might build an altar. In the old stories, the people of God stacked stones to mark the places where God had met them—where He had provided, where He had saved, where He had simply been present when presence was enough. The altar was not for God's sake. He did not need the reminder. It was for theirs. And for their children after them. When your son asks, 'What do these stones mean?'—that was the question the altar existed to answer.
The year behind you is not a blank. It is stone upon stone, moment upon moment, a record of where God met you even when you did not recognize His face. The diagnosis and the remission. The door that closed and the door that opened. The night you wept until the tears ran dry, and the morning you woke to find that somehow, impossibly, you were still breathing.
Gather the stones. Name them. Let them stand.
And then—and this is the grace hidden inside Ecclesiastes—let the new season come. The Preacher is not telling you to live in the past. He is telling you that the past has its place, and so does the future. The same God who appointed a time to mourn has appointed a time to dance. You do not have to manufacture the dancing. You simply have to trust that its season will come.
The year turns. The clock will strike. And you will step across a threshold you cannot see, into a country you have never visited.
But the God who was with you in the weeping will be with you in the laughing. The God who walked with you through the tearing down will walk with you through the building up. The stones you carry are not burdens. They are witnesses.
There is a time for everything. Even this. Even now.
Today
Before midnight, write down three stones from this year—one joy, one sorrow, and one ordinary moment that mattered more than you expected. Do not explain them. Just name them. Let them stand as your altar, marking the ground where God met you.
