If Ecclesiastes were written in rock 'n' roll lexicon, it might go something like this:

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the airwaves.

A time to enjoy hits, and a time to disdain duds.

A time to headline sold-out venues, and a time to open for a bunch of unknowns.

A time to be famous, and a time to be overshadowed by former success.

Cycles such as these are not uncommon for musicians. One year they might be standing on the mountaintop of success after a smash album, and the next they're wandering in the valley below, trying to figure out what went wrong after a once-enthusiastic audience has suddenly turned cold.

Jars of Clay, performing Friday at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, is a group that's certainly not exempt from these cycles -- especially that part about "living in the shadow of prior prosperity." The group's Charlie Lowell is the first to admit that.

"We are in a different season right now, and we are learning to do our best with it," he says.

That "season" is one in which the group has been forgotten by many listeners.

Maybe you are one of them. Flash back to 1995. Jars of Clay burst onto the pop music scene with its song Flood, which was doing just that to the airwaves.

You know it; it's the catchy ditty that goes:

Rain, rain on my face

It hasn't stopped raining for days

My world is a flood

Slowly I become one with the mud

You also might recall that Jars of Clay -- composed of Dan Haseltine, 27; Matt Odmark, 26; Lowell, 26; and Steve Mason, 25 -- are a Christian group. Or maybe you didn't know that to begin with. But at the time, they looked like they would be the first Christian rock band to attain real stardom as crossover artists, akin to what Sixpence None the Richer is doing now (yes, they're a Christian band, too).

Don't think that Jars of Clay were a flash in the pan, though. Mainstream listeners may have tuned them out after their self-titled debut, but they have found remarkable success among contemporary Christian-music fans, the audience they first played to when they started their career doing gigs at Greenville College in Illinois, where the members came together.

That groundbreaking album has sold more than 2 million copies. The follow-up, Much Afraid, went platinum with half that and won a Grammy for best pop-contemporary gospel album, and If I Left the Zoo, the group's third effort, released in November, just went gold. In Christian music, this group is one of the biggest players.

But it's still not the same. Jars of Clay, with its acoustic-guitar-driven songs, was supposed to take Christian music into the mainstream -- and keep it there.

What happened? Why is a band that once had matchbox twenty opening for it now struggling?

Perhaps the chief culprit is that after Flood, the group's songs didn't get much radio play in the secular market, and those that did, such as Crazy Times and Five Candles from the second album, didn't do nearly as well.

That loss of radio play can spell death in the music industry. It means loss of exposure to the masses, which leaves a band with only its loyal audience.

Plummeting from success can also wreak havoc on a group's morale. "It's hard on the pride," Lowell said via phone from his home in Nashville, Tenn. "We're realizing that we have a very loyal audience, and those were the first fans we had in the Christian community."

Lowell says falling out of the mainstream has turned the group's focus back to that very audience. They want to concentrate on reaching Christians and challenging them through music. One major goal in doing that is having their songs be relevant to issues their listeners face, such as doubting God or struggling in their faith.

"The times that I grew in my faith were when I doubted God. I think when we come out of that, our faith is stronger. We all (the group members) sort of grew up in Christian homes, so when we hit college, we had a lot of issues like that," Lowell said.

So the group is making the best of its situation and continues to put out great music and reach its core audience. Yet the urge to cross over again hangs above them like a rainbow spanning a sky still tainted with dark clouds. And Lowell, like the rest of the members, recognizes that.

"Once you've had a taste of it (big-time success), your pride feeds on it. It feels like it's been quite a while since it happened. We have sort of figured out not to put all of our eggs in one basket -- the secular basket," he said.

If this world were a perfect one, bands with the musical ability of Jars of Clay would never lose fans. But that's not the case; musicians will continue to have their ups and downs with the changing symphonic seasons. But at least there's one fundamental that brings a glimmer of hope: Seasons, as mysterious as they can be, are bound to change.