Turn! Turn! Turn!
Back in early February, before the coronavirus pandemic came to a head, I was in the car with my daughter who was (as usual) zipping through my Sirius presets. She flipped right by a song that I love...and I told her to go back to Turn! Turn! Turn! by the Byrds.
The song reached number one in the US in December of 1965; the year that American troops arrived in Vietnam, families agonized over draft numbers, and civil rights activists were under siege. Our ensuing conversation covered the historic time period of the song, the Vietnam era, social unrest, and how its lyrics were inspired by a passage in Ecclesiastes. The comforting message of the song is that history is cyclical, and hardships will come and go, but the beauty of life is woven throughout our own individual experiences and under God’s control and direction.
The memory and meaning of that day as we drove up the Maine coast, is not lost on me now. That fun girls’ trip with Kara on that particularly warm day in February is integral to setting the scene six weeks later home, isolated, on a dreary and rainy March afternoon. Everything has a time and a purpose under heaven.
“A time of love, a time of hate, a time of war, a time of peace. A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing.”
Rest assured, our time will come again.
