COP30 - 20 November 2025
Lend your voice

Reflection

Ecclesiastes, its authorship traditionally attributed to Solomon, is not, at a cursory reading, the most uplifting book of the Bible, with a theme that speaks frequently about the  meaningless of life. But today's passage is part of a short section on the divine order of life. It made it onto our list of possible passages for COP fortnight because it talks of there being a time to speak up, but when we read it afresh, our thoughts turned to time in general, so that's where we're starting. 

Life can get busy, and then there are times of intense busyness full of commitments of the sort that cannot be dropped, delegated or deferred. How do we respond to God's call to care for our unseen neighbour under these circumstances, when it seems that all our time is consumed by just living?

This is a question that our Creation Care Prayer Cell has returned to many times over the last couple of years, partly because of our own experiences, and partly because of our awareness of the challenges that other people experience, and we were intrigued to see if Ecclesiastes casts any light on this conundrum. So we returned to Ecclesiastes 3 with some commentaries. There is a time to study!

When you read the word ‘season’ what image does it conjure up in your mind? We guess that most of us will think of the seasons of the year, or perhaps we think of the seasons of life. In other words, our minds generally turn to extended periods of time. Certainly, when life is difficult we hope it is just for a ‘season’ and that we’ll move into easier times. But the Hebrew word zemân, that our Bibles translate as season, is actually defined as a set time, appointed time or just time 1. That set time can be extended, or it can be short, and there is nothing to suggest that it happens only once, it can be repeated. 

We have started to think about ‘a time to speak out’ in terms of lending our voice. We may not have time to throw ourselves into a particular cause, but we can lend our voice to it by signing a petition, writing to our MP, or listening to a trusted voice and amplifying it through conversations of our own. In tough personal times we may lend our voice infrequently and for short durations, but in easier times we may lend it often and for longer. And the longer we, as a Prayer Cell, have prayed together for Creation Care issues, the more we find ourselves asking others to lend us their voices. We know that it’s just another way of packaging up involvement, but somehow it works for us, and we hope it helps you.

We want to end today with verse 11 from Ecclesiastes 3, and the conviction that God has made everything beautiful for its time. It struck us that commitments of the sort that cannot be dropped, delegated or deferred quite often don’t appear beautiful to us, but our commitment to them makes them, and us, beautiful to God.

Response

Whilst lending your voice is an intentional action, it is also an individual action and will change as our lives change. We have found the following to be helpful in the context of lending our voices to organisations that work in areas that concern us.

1. Decide which organisations you want to lend your voice to. You may already know specific organisations, or you may know the areas where your heart lies, and need to find relevant organisations. We think a maximum of two or three is good.

2. Work out how you will keep in touch with what they are doing (e.g. email, letters, websites).

3. Decide how much time you currently have available to do this, you don’t have to process everything you get sent (perhaps half an hour once a week to go through that week’s emails and letters, or an hour a month, or less or more - you get the idea).

4. Commit to doing it, and commit a little extra time to respond to requests for the loan of your voice: signing a petition, writing to your MP, speaking to friends. And remember that we all use our voices in prayer!

5. Think about unsubscribing from correspondence from organisations that you don’t want to lend your voice to at the moment. You can resubscribe at a later date.

6. Commit to celebrating what you can do, and not feeling guilty about what you can’t do.

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[1] The word zemân only appears three times in the Bible, and each of those occurrences refer to an appointed time. Two of the occurrences of zemân are in the book of Esther, referring to the time set for the Feast of Purim (Esther 9:27, 31) and the third is in the book of Nehemiah, referring to an appointed time to return from a journey (Nehemiah 2:6).