I’m on Day 7 of a 14 day hotel quarantine. This – after several looooong travel days back to Malaysia, including a 10 hour layover in Amsterdam (layovers should really never be longer than 4-5 hours, in my humble opinion), 2 1/2 hours to get through immigration, and an hour long drive to the hotel – is actually quite pleasant for me.

I know, I’m weird.

Especially since I’ve seen how our Quarantine Chat group is cheering people getting out after their 14 days, my friends are posting how they can’t wait to be done, and my coworkers are checking in on me to see “how I’m holding up.” It’s very sweet, but I’m kinda in my happy place right now.

This summer was amazing and difficult in so many ways. Refreshing and saddening and wonderful and painful – a freight train of emotions and experiences that flashed by at lightning speed and left me exhausted.

So I’m grateful to have life screech to halt for a good 14 days alone in a hotel room.

It’s giving me time to process, to write, to read, to catch up on administrative work that I rarely have time to get done when I’m in my normal work routine.

I’ve got room to exercise and make sure I get in all of my steps for the day. I don’t have to worry about meals. And I can have extended quiet times with the Lord in the morning.

It’s a gift.

In fact, I’m a little bit anxious thinking about how fast it’s going by because I know it’ll be time to hit the ground running as soon as I get out. I’m not quite ready to get back into that fast-paced lifestyle yet. But, as I attended my Malaysian church’s small group last night and we studied Ecclesiastes together, I was reminded that God ordains seasons (even brief little quarantines) for a set time and it does us no good to cling to one season when it’s time to start the next. “Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7: 10).

I know I can’t stay in quarantine forever (nor would I want to, realistically), just as I knew I couldn’t stay home forever by the end of summer. And who knows how long this season in Malaysia will last either? So, it is good to cherish the season that I am in, neither clinging to the previous, nor worrying about the next. As Ecclesiastes 7:14 expounds, “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.”

That may not be reassuring to many, even I can get my heart twisted up in anxiety, asking “What do you mean, ‘so that man may not find out anything that will be after him’?!” But that’s only because I want to wrest control of my future again, as if I know better than the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God who has laid out my life so carefully.

But God wasn’t just saying that we won’t ever know anything – though maybe that’s true of our own lives – rather, He is showing us what, or Who, we can put our trust in. He made both joy and adversity; He put boundaries and lines for us in pleasant places. He knows all; He sees all; He’s got us.

And there’s no better delight than trusting Him no matter the season we’re in.

This post is also now available in podcast form, check it out here.