Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning

Jane Denniston June 27, 2026 0 0

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Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 (NIV-UK)

1 There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:
2         a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
4     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
6     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

Many years ago, at the funeral of a friend who had died of cancer in her fifties, the minister conducting her memorial service read this passage.

Initially I was hurt and horrified: it felt far too brutal, this was not her time to die, she had been taken far too soon. Then, realising that she would have chosen this passage, I reflected on her life. She had contracted cancer several years previously and it had gone into remission. During the time she got back she saw both her children married and her first grandchild born. As a woman of faith, I believe that her view was that God had given her extra time for this purpose and when the cancer came back, she was at peace with it – her time had come.

And this is life: messy, unpredictable, challenging, rewarding, sore, joyful, happy, painful, a struggle, good and bad and sometimes (perhaps rarely) a freewheel downhill with a following wind.

The challenge of this passage is to find God in the negatives – the death, the weeping, the breaking, the tearing … And what does it mean that there is a time to kill? A time to hate? Perhaps the writer of Ecclesiastes knows what God has always known: that all the negative emotions as well as the positive ones are part of what it means to be human. And perhaps, as with the gospel passage yesterday, this is more descriptive than prescriptive. My friend found peace when it was her time to die because of her faith. As the Psalmist says (Psalm 30:5), ‘Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning’. Nothing lasts forever, neither the good times, nor the bad times, but through it all God is there, rejoicing when we rejoice and weeping when we weep, loving us through sun and storm.

Prayer:

God of the nightmare and the oasis

help us to know your presence with us

in the kaleidoscope of life.

May we not fear the dark,

or the dark emotions,

but rest in your promise

to be with us until the end of time

working your purposes out

no matter how often we get in the way. Amen