Homily | September 25, 2026 | Finding God In Every Season Of Change (Episode 284)

There's an appointed time for everything.

Most of us have heard those words before.

A time to be born, a time to die, a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance.

These are beautiful words.

But I'm not sure they're comforting words.

Because Ecclesiastes is telling us something we spend much of our lives trying to avoid.

Everything changes.

There are seasons of our life.

And one of the reasons we suffer is that we keep trying to hold on to a season that God is asking us to release.

We want the good times to remain.

We want the people we love to remain.

We want our health to remain, we want our children to remain children.

We want relationships to remain exactly as they were.

We want the parish, the family, the career, the friendship, the body, the world around us to remain familiar and comfortable, but it doesn't.

And Scripture does not pretend otherwise.

There is an appointed time for everything.

Notice that Ecclesiastes does not say every season will be pleasant.

It says there will be time to laugh and there's going to be a time to weep.

There's a time to build and there's also a time to tear down.

There's a time to embrace, but there's also a time to let go.

This is where faith becomes real.

Because sometimes we think faith means that God will keep difficult seasons from happening.

But biblical faith is much deeper than that.

Faith means discovering that God is still God in every season.

God is God when the prayer is answered, and God is God when we're still waiting.

God is God when the diagnosis is good, and God is God when the news changes everything.

God is God when the relationship begins, and God is God when someone we love dies.

God is God when we understand what he's doing, and God is still God when absolutely nothing makes sense.

That's why the final line in today's reading is so important.

Ecclesiastes says that God has made everything appropriate to its time and has put the timeless into their hearts.

The timeless.

It's an extraordinary description of the human heart.

We live in time, but something inside of us longs for eternity.

That is why change hurts so much.

We want things to last, we want love to last, we want happiness to last, we want life itself to last.

And nothing in this world quite satisfies that desire.

Every beautiful moment eventually ends.

Every photograph becomes a memory.

Every achievement eventually belongs to yesterday.

Every person we love will someday have to be entrusted to the mercy of God.

And perhaps that ache we feel is not a defect in us, perhaps it is pointing us somewhere.

Saint Augustine understood this profoundly.

He wrote, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until it rests in you, those famous words.

But that's the secret.

We keep asking temporary things to satisfy an eternal hunger.

Well, they cannot.

Nor career can do it, no relationship can do it, no spouse, no amount of money can do it, no success can do it.

Not even the people we love most can carry the weight of being our eternity.

Only God can do that.

And that changes how we live through difficult seasons.

Maybe you're in a season right now that you would never have chosen.

A time of waiting, a time of grief, maybe a time of a certainty, of rebuilding, of letting go.

And perhaps your prayer has been, God, get me out of this.

Maybe today's prayer needs to be different.

God, show me how to find you in all of this.

Because sometimes we become so desperate for the next chapter that we miss what God is doing in this chapter.

There are things God teaches us in the waiting that we could never learn by getting everything immediately.

There are things we discover in weakness that success could never teach us.

There are people we become through suffering that comfort alone could never produce.

And there are things we need to release because our hands cannot receive what comes next while they are still desperately gripping what and what has already passed.

So maybe today we need to ask one simple question.

What time is it in my life?

Is it a time to build, a time to heal, a time to speak, a time to be silent, a time to begin again, a time to grieve or forgive?

Is it time to finally let go?

Let go of that one thing that's holding me back.

Whatever season you're in, do not confuse a season with your whole story.

This moment is not eternity.

This suffering is not eternity.

This too shall pass.

This disappointment is not eternity, even this life is not eternity.

God has placed the timeless in your heart because ultimately your heart was made for something this world cannot give you.

It was made for him.

So do not be afraid when the season changes.

The season changes all the time, but God does not.

And sometimes faith is simply having enough trust to release what was, receive what is, and place what comes next into the hands of God.

Amen.