CIRCUMSTANCES
BEYOND OUR CONTROL, PART 1
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 (
David Bruce Linn,
Pastor-Teacher
21 August, 2005
All Rights Reserved
I. JIM MAKES IT
Nate's nostrils flared with the smell of burning cordite
explosive as he hunched down behind the sandbags surrounding his bunker. He hefted a shell to the muzzle of the mortar
and waited a moment as his partner, Jim, adjusted the aim. Rivulets of sweat, partly from the heat and
partly from the stress, rolled down his body and soaked his green fatigues.
"Now!" shouted his boyish-looking partner,
tapping him on the shoulder at the same time.
Nate dropped the shell into the tube and the powerful "thunk"
of the launch shook his torso. He
plugged his ears with his fingers. A few
moments passed as the shell arced through the jungle air. Then came the explosion, followed by a spray
of dirt, plant matter, and a boot with part of leg still inside. Then screams of anguish.
Screams don't have a color, Nate thought. Your race or nationality doesn't matter
when your leg has been blown off. Glad
his momma isn't here to see this.
They had found the range.
"Now!" Jim shouted again.
Nate dropped another shell, "thunk," and another mother's son
left the world.
They heard an ominous answering "thunk" from
behind some far bushes. There was a
brief sickening silence. The blast of a
shell exploding just beyond their u-shaped bunker blew them forward over the
sandbags in a shower of dirt. Someone
else had found the range. When the immediate
shock of the hit passed, Nate cried out to Jim and realized he was nearly deaf,
his eardrums blown in by the concussion.
He put his hand to his ear and saw blood. Nate's partner didn't answer and didn't
move. A trickle of blood from Jim's
scalp striped his neck and soaked through his collar.
Nate knew that the next incoming shell would kill them
both, so he rolled Jim up onto his shoulders as he had been trained to do and
tried to stand. A stabbing,
breath-stealing pain in his left leg tore the breath out of him for a
moment. He steadied himself on the
sandbag wall. It's walk or die!
Nate thought as he forced himself to stand with Jim draped across his
neck. Half-limping, half-dragging his
bleeding leg, Nate moved off into the jungle.
The next thing Nate sensed was the brightness of the sun
filtering through his closed eyelids.
When he opened his eyes he realized he was on his back with other
wounded men at the evacuation point. Two
medics were scurrying from man to man making life-or-death triage decisions and
performing critical interventions--blood flow stanched with pressure dressings
for some, shattered limbs splinted and placed in traction for others, and
eyelids closed manually for yet others.
Nate heard one of the medics addressing him, muffled as
if through layers of cloth. "How
you doin', buddy?"
"My left leg..." Nate panted. "It hurts so much I'm going to pass
out..." Without a word the medic
opened a single-use morphine injection, pressed it into Nate's good leg, and
moved off. A flood of relief flowed
through Nate's system, and as he relaxed he began to review the events which
brought him to this tropical clearing with shrapnel in his body.
He remembered he and Jim talking as they set up the
shelling point. "You know we're not
likely to make it through this one," Jim had said. The apprehension was evident in his voice.
Nate saw a crack in Jim's armor for the first time. "Well, at least I know where I'm
going. What about you?"
Jim was more serious than Nate had ever seen him. "I've been avoiding that question for
years... It all seems different from
inside this bunker.” He looked down,
embarrassed, and began kicking the dirt with the toe of his boot. “Whuddaya gotta do?" They stopped what
they were doing for a moment, and Nate remembered leading Jim through a prayer
of commitment to Christ. He heard no
angels sing, but it was done. And then
came the shelling.
Nate rolled his head to one side on the ground and saw
that he was lying right next to Jim.
Jim's face was puppet-like and lifeless.
Nate saw the black triage tag on Jim's body fluttering in the powerful
wash of the evac helicopter's rotors. No
one saw his tears, and no one could hear his cracking voice over the pounding
noise of the great chopper: "Thank God, Jim--we made it!"
II. A TIME FOR EVERY EVENT UNDER HEAVEN
The author of the book of Ecclesiastes wrote that while
we all like to think we can shape our lives to suit ourselves, circumstances
beyond our control largely define our experience. He made such a comprehensive list that anyone
who would disagree is silenced:
And there is a time for every event under heaven--
A time to give birth, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to tear down, and a time to build up.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing.
A time to search, and a time to give up as lost;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away.
A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together;
A time to be silent, and a time to speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)
Nate and Jim had discovered that they were caught in
circumstances larger than themselves.
The time of their lives was a time of war, a time to kill, a time to
tear down, and a time to weep. For Jim
it was a time to die, and for Nate it was a time to mourn. The last idea in those soldiers' minds was
that they were in control of anything.
They didn't ask for their country to be at war, or to be drafted, or to
be assigned to the infantry, or to be sent in-country, or to be assigned to man
a mortar on enemy lines. But that was
the time of their lives.
Have you ever felt that way? I remember as a student always feeling like I
was caught in a riptide of academic demands which dictated my life for long
periods of time. I'm sure many of us
feel that way about our jobs. Ministries
can have the same feeling. Yes, you
volunteered, but now you are part of a ministry machine which just keeps
running and you must run to keep up.
Many people struggle with being there in the present
moment of their lives. There is an old
proverb: "Wherever you find yourself, there you are." It's a joke, but there is a touch of reality
therapy in there. Many of us spend time
thinking about either the past or the future, and how we wish we could live
there. God says in the book of
Ecclesiastes that the times of our lives move inexorably from one phase to
another. We cannot live in the past or
the future, and the attempt to do so wastes the only time in which we have to
live: the present.
Have you ever been living your own life and had the
feeling that you were in a movie? I
often feel that way at weddings, funerals, awards ceremonies, graduations, and
such events. It's almost as if I have
already lived the experience, taken the photos, and am looking back on it even
as I am living it. This is just a small
touch of the awareness that life moves in great events over most of which we
have no control.
When my wife, Barbara, and I were taking maternity
classes for our first child we were warned that the pain of the transition
phase of labor was so excruciating that it sometimes caused mothers to think
crazy thoughts. I thought this was
amusing until I saw my own wife in exquisite pain, and she was honestly
suggesting that she be allowed to go home, get some sleep, and start again in
the morning. No, for her it was a time
to give birth, for my son it was a time to be born, and for me it was a time to
love. None of us was free to take a
breather. The same "stuckness"
is true of every person, with different specific life situations.
III. SURVIVING OUR CIRCUMSTANCES
While this reality might seem grim, God gave us some
wonderfully encouraging words in the book of Ecclesiastes. He proves that he understands our situation
in verse 9: "What profit is there to the worker from that in which he
toils?" Yes, we are stuck in
circumstances beyond our control, yes we must perform our duties in those
circumstances, but at least God knows the question we all have: "Is this
worth it? Is there some value to this,
or should I just fall apart or quit?"
We all need someone to listen to us, who will quietly
listen to us spill our minds and hearts, all the while giving us feedback that
they are understanding what we are saying.
Sometimes we get so frustrated that we cry out: “What's the point?!” The Lord tells us through Ecclesiastes that
he is listening from heaven. If we quiet
our souls enough we may be able to hear him reply softly: “I hear you.”
And then the Lord begins explaining to us how to survive
our circumstances by asserting that the tasks associated with the times of our
lives are given by God himself: "I have seen the task which God has
given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves" (Ecc.
3:10). This knowledge is the first step
out of the morass of meaninglessness. If
the major efforts of our lives are just thrust upon us accidentally, then they
mean nothing: work, marriage, raising a family, serving our community, or
religion, for example.
The play Waiting for Godot focuses upon two men on
the side of the road waiting for a third man named Godot. The two men talk about all manner of things,
they do different things which amount to nothing, and they spend the entire play
just waiting. Godot never comes. It's infuriating! The playwright's argument is that life is
lived on the way to somewhere we never reach, saying things which do not
matter, performing deeds which change nothing, and waiting for someone who
never comes. It is godless, meaningless,
and hopeless. Many modern and postmodern
people live in precisely that way.
But God says “No!”
The tasks of life are part of great movements of humanity which have
been crafted by God for his purposes.
Even the homeliest tasks are matters of great moment in the plan of
God. We are not just all waiting for
Godot!
In fact, we have a precious promise given to us in the
first part of the next verse: "He has made everything appropriate in
its time" (Ecc. 3:11a). Other
translations say "he has made everything beautiful in his (or
"its") time. Why is everything
beautiful in its time? Because God is
working all things together for good to those who love him. God is shaping history and our lives in
particular in harmony with his plan. And
it is not deterministic—we are not puppets.
The first verse of the chapter says the same thing: "There
is an appointed time for everything."
And who is doing the appointing?
Who sets the times and seasons?
God himself rules the circumstances of our lives: "Your eyes
have seen my unformed substance; /And in Your book were all written, /The days
that were ordained for me, /When as yet there was not one of them"
What a relief for Christians to know that the student
grinding away at studies, the worker at his or her labors, the mother at the
unending tasks of motherhood, and the minister of Christ whose job description
seems to have no boundaries are doing something which God has made fitting for
its time. It is part of a divine plan
with our individual names on it. The large
circumstances which dictate our lives are not bleakly random, but are part of a
beautiful plan.
And then comes the hard part. We are not given to know God's big plan: "...Man
will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the
end" (Ecc. 3:11c). When we are
caring for someone at the sickbed, or suffering from illness ourselves, or
fighting a losing battle with our budget, or any of a million taxing labors we
might be required to do, it can seem hard and even cruel that we cannot know
what the purpose of it is. It is then
that we must take our refuge in the care of God for us.
4. CONCLUSION
Have you ever seen a cross-country horse jumping
competition? A course is devised over a
fairly large piece of real estate with all sorts of obstacles for the horse to
negotiate. The horse and rider must get
over bushes, boxes, fences, tables, water, and anything the course creators
devise. The competitors are timed as
they ride the course. What raises the
stakes is that the horse is not allowed to see the course or jumps in advance. The rider walks the course, memorizing the
turns and obstacles. When they finally
begin their timed competition, the horse has an experience very much like we
have as we go through life. The horse is
totally dependent upon the rider to guide him over every obstacle, never having
seen it before! Horses which trust their
riders have a great time, and the others balk, run wide, and fall, often
injuring themselves and their masters.
Are you willing to trust God and jump when he says
"jump"? He knows the obstacles
you and I face perfectly. "Humble
yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at
the proper time, casting all your anxiety upon Him, because He cares for
you" (1 Pet. 5:6-7).
No, we live in our times, we perform our tasks and duties
with faith and the knowledge that God seeks the ultimate good of every believer
in Christ, even when we cannot see how.
Maybe Nate and Jim had to go to war so Jim could make it safely home to
heaven. It may be that you are in a
difficult situation so that God can change your destiny, or that of someone
else.
I do not know all of God's big plan, but I know he cares
for you. If you have not yet received
Christ, don't you want to know that God is overseeing the circumstances of your
life for your good? A simple prayer to
confess your sins and receive his forgiveness can make it so.
God invites you to name your anxieties—the circumstances
of life which make you feel trapped: finances, parenting, work, physical
restrictions, emotional issues, loneliness, and losses of every sort. Instead of quitting or freaking out because
of them, pray these declarations:
1. Lord Jesus, thank you that you care for me
more than anyone I have ever met;
2. Lord, thank you that I can cast all my cares
upon you;
3. Lord, I believe that you will exalt me at the
proper time;
4. Lord, I choose to humble myself under your
mighty hand;
5. Lord, I choose to jump when you say
"jump";
6. Lord, thank you that you make all the times
of my life beautiful according to your plan.
Amen.
[This message is an update and expansion of Being There, Part 1, originally preached in August 2002.]