Everything Will Have Its Season
When my father died, my family asked if I had any music that could be played at the funeral by myself, my musical sibling and our spouses. I selected this melody, although it was originally set to the words of a different author. But when I read the lesson from Ecclesiastes that was to be read at the service, its words seemed to glom onto my tune. So I decided to write new lyrics, even though just the instrumental version was played. After suffering the downward spiral of dementia, falling and breaking his hip (twice) and then encountering a stroke during surgery, my father's season of life had come to its end. At times like this we often stop to take account of time gone by. My father and I had never been close. He had grown up on a farm and wasn't allowed to attend school beyond Grade 9, spending a large part of his working life writing parking tickets. That left him poorly equipped and often angry at the city life in which he had to make his living. He rarely saw eye-to-eye with his university-bound sons. But now the time for fighting and even to speak had passed; my father could no longer understand our words. What remained? My father had contributed as well as he could. The rest was up to his sons. And with that faint, tenuous legacy, God extracts what is possible from each generation and asks the next to carry on.