By: Pastor Jarren Rogers

I was digging through filing cabinets the other day and found an archeological relic. Something so rare that Indiana Jones would be jealous. When I uncovered it, I blew off the dust and held it to the light, admiring its antiquity. 

It was a floppy disk. 

When I was a kid, I was given an old computer from someone in our church. And when I say old, I mean ooooold (that’s five O’s).  One of my favorite computer games to play was rendition of the old game show Concentration. It’s a matching game where you slowly uncover a puzzle and solve it to win. I hardly ever won because I was only seven and could barely spell concentration, let alone decode the secret phrase.

That Concentration game was installed on a floppy disk. It was the only reason I was able to identity the artifact I had recovered from the filing cabinet. 

Finding the floppy disk got me thinking about how quickly technology has progressed. When the floppy disk was invented, I’m sure it was groundbreaking. But then CD’s came and flash drives, and now everything is just stored on the cloud, wherever that is. 

The floppy disk’s time has ended, and now the only place you can find them is buried at the bottom of old filing cabinets. 

It made me think of this verse:

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2).  

The writer of Ecclesiastes invites us into the realization that everything has a season. Everything has a good and proper time.  

But now, think about this: If there is a season for everything, then just like the floppy disk, seasons always come to an end. 

This is important to understand because, amidst seasons of difficulty and unrest, it may seem as if they will never end. Our struggles sometimes seem like giant insurmountable obstacles that will change the course of our lives.

But the reality may be that you are in the middle of a season. Seasons end. Crisis diminish. Failures are forgotten. Some of our most embarrassing moments are stories we can now laugh at. Why? Because it was just a season. And that season has ended. 

Sometimes the best way to get through life’s most difficult seasons is to be reminded that there will be an end. One day, what you are going through will be in the past. Years from now, you will look at your current circumstances in a completely different context and see things you can’t see now. You’ll see how God provided. How far He’s brought you. How much you’ve grown. And somehow–I can’t explain it–we can be thankful for even the most challenging seasons. 

There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the heavens. Soon this season will come to an end.