Ecclesiastes 3:1-15

Contemporary English Version

Everything Has Its Time

3 Everything on earth
has its own time
    and its own season.
²There is a time
for birth and death,
    planting and reaping,
³for killing and healing,
    destroying and building,
⁴for crying and laughing,
    weeping and dancing,
⁵for throwing stones
and gathering stones,
    embracing and parting.
⁶There is a time
for finding and losing,
    keeping and giving,
⁷for tearing and sewing,
    listening and speaking.
⁸There is also a time
for love and hate,
    for war and peace.

What God Has Given Us To Do

⁹What do we gain by all our hard work? ¹⁰I have seen what difficult things God demands of us. ¹¹God makes everything happen at the right time. Yet none of us can ever fully understand all he has done, and he puts questions in our minds about the past and the future. ¹²I know the best thing we can do is to always enjoy life, ¹³because God's gift to us is the happiness we get from our food and drink and from the work we do. ¹⁴Everything God has done will last forever; nothing he does can ever be changed. God has done all this, so that we will worship him.

¹⁵Everything that happens
    has happened before,
and all that will be
    has already been—
God does everything
    over and over again.^[a]

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Footnotes

3.15 God does … again: One possible meaning for the difficult Hebrew text.

Lamentations 3:25-33

Contemporary English Version

²⁵The Lord is kind to everyone
    who trusts and obeys him.
²⁶It is good to wait patiently
    for the Lord to save us.
²⁷When we are young,
    it is good to struggle hard
²⁸and to sit silently alone,
if this is what
    the Lord intends.
²⁹Being rubbed in the dirt
    can teach us a lesson;^[a]
³⁰we can also learn from insults
    and hard knocks.

³¹The Lord won't always reject us!
³²    He causes a lot of suffering,
but he also has pity
    because of his great love.
³³The Lord doesn't enjoy
    sending grief or pain.