Open Hands · Week 2 · Sunday · ANXIETY

I am a planner. Not only by trade — by temperament, which is the part you cannot put down at the end of the day. I run two businesses. I build the plan, I work the plan, and when the plan stalls I build a better plan. That has been the shape of my adult life and most of the time it has served me well.

Which is why this verse has always been a problem for me.

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:Ecclesiastes 3:1 (BSB)

Read it slowly, because it is easy to hear it as encouragement. It does not say there is a season for everything you decide to do. It says the seasons are already there. Appointed. Arriving on their own schedule, entirely indifferent to your calendar.

Which means the one thing a man like me cannot do is choose which season he is in.

The Oldest Promise About Time

And this is not a one-off observation buried in a wisdom book. It goes back much further, to the first promise God makes about how the world will run after the flood.

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall never cease.”Genesis 8:22 (BSB)

Seedtime and harvest. Not one long productive stretch. Two different works, in two different seasons, and you do not get to run them at the same time. You cannot harvest in seedtime no matter how motivated you are, and everything in me wants to try.

The word our culture hands us for managing all this is balance. Carry more, carry it evenly, distribute the weight well enough and you can have every season at once. It is the first question a lot of people ask about a job. It is on every list of what a healthy life looks like.

The Bible does not offer it. Not once. It offers rhythm, which is a different thing entirely — work and rest, seedtime and harvest, morning and evening, one after another rather than all together.

Balance says carry it all at once. Rhythm says carry this, now.

Beautiful In Its Time

There is a line a few verses later that I have needed more than I would like to admit.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom the work that God has done from beginning to end.Ecclesiastes 3:11 (BSB)

Both halves of that matter. The first half says the beauty is real but it is scheduled — in its time, not in mine. The second half says you will not be able to see the whole of what He is doing, and it says it as a plain fact rather than a rebuke.

What This Week Is About

Anxiety is not always a disorder and it is not always a weakness. Very often it is the ordinary result of living in a season that is not the one you are actually in — running ahead into a season that has not arrived, or still working a season that has already closed.

This week we will meet five people doing exactly that. A woman measuring today against a version of herself that does not exist anymore. A kid rehearsing a day that has not happened. A man who is behind on a schedule nobody ever handed him. A couple trying to run two seasons at once. A woman who has not stopped in a year.

Tomorrow it starts with a badge on a desk.