Thought for Today
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,
Ecclesiastes 3:1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
Mark 1:14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15 and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
Do you ever find yourself wanting to hit the Pause button on your life? Maybe things are going so well, you just want to stop and savor the moment. Or, maybe things are going so poorly you just feel overwhelmed by it all and need a few minutes of ‘quiet time.’ Sadly (?) life doesn’t come with a Pause button.
A few years ago, I heard the plaintive cry, “Stop the world, I want to get off.” “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off is a 1961 musical with a book, music, and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. In 1966 Warner Bros. released a film adaptation of the play. In 1996, a film version was produced for TV, made for the A&E Network. According to Oscar Levant, the play's title was derived from a graffito.” (Wikipedia) There are those days when I feel the need to adopt that play title as my own personal mantra, “Stop the world, I want to get off.”
I long ago lost count of the number of times Greta and I have commented that we just wish time would stand still. Virtually every time occurs during some period of great happiness and joy. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pause everything in such moments? Of course, we can’t. Life does not come with a Pause button. Life is not like streaming a movie or television series. Neither can we binge-watch life . . . although there are those times of stress, change and trouble when we might wish we could just get everything over and done with in a single session of pain and discomfort.
Christians speak of God and try to understand God as eternal and infinite. When I studied calculus, I could integrate a function over the range from 0 to infinity. That was a long time ago. Then or now, however, I’m not sure my finite, temporally bound mind truly understands either eternity or infinity. I have read that the Egyptian hieroglyphic for any large number is a person holding both hands at its side with the palms up, showing the frustration of trying to understand any number greater than one thousand. I have also read of a technique to demonstrate to us that frustration. Close your eyes, fill your mind with the picture of a brick wall. Try to count the bricks without losing count or that mental image.
Anyone who has read any translation of Genesis 1:1 has been faced with the impossibility of trying to comprehend a ‘time’ before “In the beginning.” How can anything be before its beginning? Yet, when Moses asked God, “Exodus 3:13 If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" 14 God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" God simply is. God is, God was, God always will be. God is eternal.
The English language, like every language I know of, has tenses for its verbs. English has a past tense, present tense, future tense and some variations of each. We can think, write and speak about what was, what is and what will be. But, truthfully, we can only actually live in the present. In fact, if we obsess about either the past or the future, we run the risk of missing what is occurring in the present and can even develop mental problems. Wednesday, I wrote about “that pesky line about ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.’” (George Santayana)
We can and must learn from the past. We can and must plan for the future. But Jesus told us, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
Stay safe, repent and believe, trust God,
Pastor Ray