The Rhythm of Grace
The auction started at nine, but folks were parked along the fence line by seven thirty. An old man everyone called Bear had passed during this hot summer and his kids had decided to sell off the place piece by piece. The tractor went first. Then the anvil his daddy had hauled up from Waco in a wagon. Then a box of hand tools worn smooth in the handle from sixty years of gripping.
I stood near the back, hat pushed low against the sun, and watched a stranger walk off with a claw hammer that had built half the fences in that county. Nobody said much. There is a kind of quiet that settles over an auction like that, the quiet of people watching a life get folded up and carried away in the beds of pickup trucks.
An old rancher next to me spat in the dirt and said, “Everything’s got its season, son. You hold what you’re given, and then one day you don’t.”
I thought about that the whole drive home.
In Plain English
Ecclesiastes puts it plainer than most of us can stand to hear. “A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.”
That verse does not ask our permission. It just tells us the truth of how living works. We are handed things, for a while, and then the hand opens again.
There is a season for getting and keeping. A friendship starts. A door swings open you did not knock on. A prayer gets answered in a way you were not expecting. Those seasons deserve to be held onto with both hands, and remembered even after they pass, because the memory of what God has already done has a way of carrying a man through what is still coming.
But there is another season, and it is the one nobody wants a sermon about. The season of losing. The season of casting away. We are not built for letting go. We would rather grip something long past its time than open our hand and trust that the emptiness means something.
I have carried things too long myself. A grudge that outlived the man who caused it. A regret that kept replaying a conversation that could not be changed no matter how many times I ran it back. Weight like that does not protect you. It just tires you out.
Letting go does not mean it did not matter. It means you finally trust God enough to set it down in front of Him instead of carrying it into tomorrow.
Ecclesiastes says God makes everything beautiful in His time. Not our time. His. That is the hard part and the mercy of it both. We want the explanation before we hand it over.
Faith runs the other direction. You hand it over first, and the understanding, if it comes at all, comes later, usually quieter than you expected.
A field has to be cleared before it can be planted again. A tree lets its leaves fall before anything new can grow. The dark comes before the next morning, every time, and nobody has ever stopped it by staying up all night arguing with the sky.
Maybe that is where you are standing right now. Between an auction of your own and whatever comes after it. Not sure whether you are supposed to hold on or let go. That not knowing is not a failure of your faith. It is just the shape faith takes in the middle of a season that has not finished turning yet.
You do not have to see the whole plan. You only have to trust the One who already does.
Scripture
“A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.” Ecclesiastes 3:6 (KJV)
A Prayer
Heavenly Father,
Thank You for walking with me through every season, the ones I asked for and the ones I did not.
Give me the wisdom to know when to hold on and when to let go. Help me cherish what You have placed in my hands without gripping it so tight that I miss what You are doing next. When something ends, give me the courage to release it without bitterness.
Take the regrets and the old hurts I have carried longer than I should have. Teach me to trust that Your plans reach further down the road than my eyes can see.
When one season closes and the next has not yet opened, remind me that You are still at work in the space between.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen.
Written by Jimmie Aaron Kepler, Ed.D. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. You are welcome to share or adapt it provided proper credit is given to the author.
