There is a Time for Everything

There is a Bradford Pear tree living in a tiny swath of soil in the middle of the paved parking lot in front of my building. I can see this pitiful tree from my desk, and I call it pitiful because it is currently blooming... in November. This isn't new. It has bloomed out of season every year for the past six years.

Confused and excited bees swarm the ill-timed white blossoms. People point at it as they park beneath it. The tree is living and doing what it was made to do, but it is not doing it in time with nature and it is, therefore, to be pointed at and given strange looks and pitied.

See, there is a time for everything. The writer of Ecclesiastes penned that thousands of years ago. There is a time for fruit trees to produce fluffy white flowers and there is a time for its leaves to blaze with the colors of fall.

I understand the pitiful little tree because I have been that unseasonable tree.

There is a time to remodel a house. There is a time to go back to school. There is a time to have babies. There is a time to start a business and buy a new car and write a novel. But those times are not at the same time. It took me most of my twenties to figure that out.

How about you? Are you trying to do the right thing but at the wrong time? Or are you trying to do everything at once and therefore fail to do anything? Think of the tree with frostbitten blossoms, my friend, and do what is right in this season.