I recently got around to reading the October/November 2020 AARP magazine.  I always surprises me the people they interview for the magazine are actually senior citizens (although it is a magazine for seniors).  What amazes me are they are my age or older and that just can’t be as I haven’t aged.  I still feel young at heart but my body tells me every day, “Don’t kid yourself, honey”.

This issue’s article featuring Bruce Springsteen spoke to me the most, not because I am or ever was a rabid fan although I like his music, but one particular quote he gave resonated with me and made me think about life.  He said, “I heard something of mine from 1975 on a record the other day, and I said, ‘That was about seven or eight lives ago. It was a full and entire life of its own. And I lived that one and it was a great one and now I’m living another one.’” 

For example, Bruce went on to say, “I lived one life when I started playing with my first band, another when I started the E Street Band, another when me and my wife Patti were raising our children whom are all now adults. We are now living as empty nesters.  So, you live a lot of lives over the course of your one life.” 

This led to me to reminisce about a conversation I had with one of my good friends about 20 years ago.  We were discussing about how many sympathy cards we had sent out recently and why that was.  We then concluded we go through different phases in our life (different lives) where different events are taking place.  Right out of college you are giving a lot of wedding cards, followed the next few years by baby cards, followed by your children giving their friends birthday cards as they attend their friend’s birthday parties and so on, then then on to sympathy cards when your friends start losing their parents.  Each is its own “life” within a life.

In Ecclesiastes 3: 1-2 we find these words.  “To everything, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted”.

What Bruce Springsteen called a “life” some might call a “season”.  Whatever we call it, it is essentially the same thing.  What holds true is everything has a time element to it that has been established by God.  He provides us what we need and when we need it in our journey through the seasons. We can rest in the knowledge He loves us unconditionally and will always be with us, no matter what “life” we are currently living.

Patty