Daily Manna · Day 288 · October 15
Beautiful in His Time
“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart.”
A child holds one jigsaw piece up to the window and turns it over and over, looking for the whole picture inside the one piece.
The word to stop on is world. He hath set the world in their heart. It is olam in Hebrew, and almost everywhere else the translators render it everlasting, or for ever: the everlasting God, from everlasting to everlasting. Solomon uses that word for what God has put inside a person. Not the planet. The long horizon. The sense that time runs further in both directions than you can see, and that what you are looking at is a piece of something.
That explains the ache people cannot name. You are not restless because you are ungrateful. You are carrying a capacity for a scale you have no access to, in a life that hands you Tuesdays. And it explains the first half of the verse too. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time means the thing's own proper moment, not yours; the arrangement is real and the timing is not on your calendar.
But do not stop where the comfort is, because Solomon does not. The clause that finishes the verse is usually left off: so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. That is a boundary, and a hard one. You have been given the longing and denied the overview, on purpose. People who refuse that arrangement and insist on the finished picture before they will go on do not become wiser. They become bitter, and then they stop turning the piece over at all.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 288 is Things Too High (Psalm 131:1).