Pop’s Lessons– Part Thirty

9/21/80

‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven’– Eccles. 3.1

To all things worldly there is a beginning and a time to end, and then a new beginning is offered. In every age and culture human beings have felt the awesome presence of time. Our consciousness has been seared with the knowledge that all things worldly have a beginning and an end.  Our lives are bracketed by the twin moments of birth and death. Our days dawn and set.  We have come to know that time, its passage, its relentless motion is representative of the constancy and reliability of a great universal law.  We cannot know our fate from one moment to the next. But we know with a certainty that the great wheel of beginning and end will turn and more importantly will repeat itself. Humanity has always honored those seasonal portals which passes in and out of the house of life.  Humanity has always celebrated the arrival of spring when knew growth comes from a barren earth, when the sun once more invokes its blessings of light and warmth, when the creatures of the field awaken from their winter’s  sleep, when all nature seems to revive with a new vitality. At this most sacred moment, all humanity rejoices and pays tribute to the fulfillment  of God’s promise that a new cycle of time and life shall begin again.

Two thousand years ago during this same observance a great teacher  and reformer sat with his disciples. His doctrine of love was to sweep across the face of half our globe, yet in a few brief hours he would be betrayed by one of his own, arrested, and put to the cross, and only then gathered into the glory of his Father on Easter Sunday.  Human beings had brought the darkness of sin upon themselves, but through God’s will humans will  refute the darkness and bring new light and beauty to those around them with the Gospel.

And if we pray, let our prayers first implore our God never to silence the voice of conscience within us that we will be guided by its dictates. Then let our prayers be of thanks to God who in his wisdom has decreed that in due time, in the midst of the darkest of nights, through our own labors we shall pick up the candle and rekindle the light of understanding and love and the presage of a new and most glorious day when we will be with our Maker forever. Then we should thank God for the part He let me play in the endless pageant of life.