My dad used to sing it to us as kids. Of course back then I didn't know the meaning of it's lyrics, and I'm sure the screaming girls didn't either. Peter Seger, a folk singer, based it off Ecclesiastes 3 from the bible and was later remade by many artists including The Byrds, a 60s rock band. I found myself reciting one of it's lines to a dear friend today, "There is a season for everything".
Just from the catchy chorus I always knew it meant that there is a time for everything, but after reading and rereading the entire verse, it made me realize how unknowing the human heart is.
Eccl. 3:11 reads, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
This got me stuck at first until I read that the Hebrew translation of eternity means to "hide or conceal". I think hidden things of an everlasting nature have been put in all of our hearts so that we can't always understand why things happen the way they do, when they do, but at the right time we will.
With everything happening in the world, this isn't easy to understand. I'm troubled, daily, but on a smaller scale, I am comforted.
As Pete Seeger said in an interview with Alec Wilkinson, writer of The Protest Singer, "It's worth considering. The world is filled with opposites intertangled. Good and bad. Nobody knows. Only God knows. The agricultural revolution took thousands of years, the industrial revolution took hundreds of years, and now the information revolution only took decades. If we use the brains God gave us, who knows what miracles can happen in the next few years.
