Thought for Today
Ecclesiastes 3:1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: . . . 11 He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
Matthew 1:15 "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
Luke 12:56 You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
Do you remember the Righteous Brothers’ song Unchained Melody? This morning, the words “And time goes by so slowly/And time can do so much” keep echoing in my mind. If anything, Albert Einstein underestimated the relativity of time. Some days, weeks, months and years it truly does go by so slowly. Other days, weeks, months and years it goes by so quickly I cannot keep track of time.
Then, there are times like I am experiencing right now that are somewhere in between. We experience time primarily in the present. Humans are mostly captive to the ‘right now.’ Our languages have multiple verb tenses, but our lives are in the present tense. Our memories are in the past. Our hopes are in the future. Our reality is right in front of our faces.
Do you remember Doris Day singing Que Sera, Sera? “Whatever will be will be. The future’s not ours to see.” It is easy to fall into the trap of endlessly wondering about what will be. It is easy to fall into the trap of accepting the inevitability of the future, not realizing that what we do in the present shapes ‘whatever will be.’ Is the future immutable, already predetermined? Or, will the future be whatever we make it?
Our perception of time, its passage and its potentials is also heavily influenced by our age . . . our calendar age and our ‘maturity’ age. Can you still remember from elementary school how long the school year was and how short was the summer? That relative difference was much more than the mere fact that one was 3 times longer on the calendar. During those 3 months of summer, time moved faster than during those 9 months of school! I actually enjoyed school; but, I enjoyed playing with my friends even more.
I remember my mother telling me as she grew older that sometimes the days seemed to drag, but the years flew by. Maybe we need to be more explicit when we talk about time, carefully differentiating between subjective time and ‘measured’ time. Scripture talks about both. Scripture also seems to understand time somewhat differently than did my calculus textbook or any of my science textbooks.
As Christians, how are we to approach time? Our understanding of Creation and the universe God has created does correspond to the idea of “a time for every matter under heaven.” Science has tried to develop theories about the beginning of time, e.g., the Big Bang Theory. We have divided and subdivided time into incrementally smaller and smaller segments, “The base unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), and by extension most of the Western world, is the second, defined as about 9 billion oscillations of the caesium atom.” (en.wikipedia.org) The smallest unit listed in that same article is the quectosecond, 10 (-30 power) seconds. That is a really small period of time!!
However, as a Christian, I also know the truth of “yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” I know the truth of “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
It is not the variability of time that is the issue. Those summers of my youth were relished in the same actual passage of minutes and seconds as were those endless days of the school year. Those words sung by Doris Day were true to a limited degree, “The future’s not ours to see.” But only to a limited degree! I can see some of the future, interpret some of the future from “the present time.”
Most importantly, as a Christian, I know the lesson of the Parable of the Rich Man in Luke 12:16 -20, “But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'”
Stay safe, use your time now to prepare for the future, trust God,
Pastor Ray