The Monday After • Jun 22, 2026
The Seasons You Didn't Put on Your Calendar
Darren Carlson
I keep a calendar app like most of you. Meetings blocked off in blue, kids' practices color-coded, a checklist labeled "errands" that is more aspiration than plan. What I don't keep anywhere is a place for the phone call I'm going to get this Tuesday afternoon, or the conversation that's going to derail Wednesday, or the news I haven't heard yet that's already true on Thursday. None of that is on my calendar. All of it is already in my week.
Ecclesiastes 3 opens with the most famous lines in the book — a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to weep, and a time to laugh — and we have heard them so often, at so many weddings and so many funerals, that we've stopped noticing how unflinching they actually are. The speaker in Ecclesiastes isn't handing you a schedule. He's hanging a tapestry on the wall and asking you to step back and look at it. Fourteen pairs. Twenty-eight times. Born and die. Weep and laugh. Keep and cast away. He is describing what happens to you, not what you get to plan.
Start with the bookends. You didn't pick the day you were born — not the family, not the body, not the century. And you won't pick the day you die. You have no control over either edge of your life. In between, you'll move through gathering seasons and casting-away seasons, and you won't get a vote on when one ends and the other begins. Time runs in one direction, and it is relentless. Given enough of it, time takes back everything it gives.
Let me give you a test. Imagine I handed you a real time machine this morning, and told you that you could go back and live one single day again. Pick the day.
Now ask the harder question: why is the day you picked already gone? Because every day is. The best day of your life is in the past. You cannot go back. You cannot stay. You cannot stop it. I stood over my own kids when they were little trying to capture a moment, and most of what I've actually captured is the trying. My memories are pictures, not the event I was trying to capture with a picture.
But there is a second half to this that the speaker of Ecclesiastes could not yet see. There was a time to be born — and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. There was a time to weep — Jesus wept. There was a time to keep silence — he opened not his mouth. There was a time to die — it is finished. The seasons of Ecclesiastes 3 are not only the seasons we live through. They are the seasons Christ lived through. They do not have the final word over you, because the One who is Lord of every season has already walked through them all.
You cannot dam the river of time. But you can trust the current to the One who made it. My times are in your hands (Psalm 31:15). Your seasons don't ask your permission. But they are not unsupervised.
A missionary I know was serving amongst Muslims in the middle of nowhere.
One evening a Muslim woman came to her with her child who had been burned. The missionary started caring for the burns on the child, and when she turned and told the mother, "I am doing this in the name of Jesus who loves you." After a few minutes of explaining, the Muslim woman said with a laugh, "Oh, that's who he is. I've been waiting for you."
This Muslim woman grew up in folk Islam. When she was 14, she was given as a bride to a witch doctor who was 30 years older than her. She was payment for the witch doctor putting a curse on her father's neighbor for planting crops on his land. The curse worked - the oldest son dropped dead.
One night shortly after her marriage, a man dressed in white like the sun came to her and told her, "I am the way, the truth, the life. Follow me." She explained, "He showed me scars on his hands and feet. He told me he was God and that one day he would rescue me. He told me one day someone would come and tell me his name."
She then turned to the missionary and said, "I have been patiently waiting for you."
If this week's devotional struck a nerve, pick up Joni Eareckson Tada's A Spectacle of Glory. She has lived nearly six decades in a season she did not schedule — paralyzed in two seconds at age seventeen.
Thanks for checking in.
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