Time On My Mind

My poor beautiful wife!

Yesterday her job required that my poor Ginny attend an all day-loooong strategy meeting across town.

Management required meeting participants to turn off cell phones.

Time dragged.

She could well have taught the whole seminar, but she had to just sit through it and listen.

Ginny got so bored she just had to check the time; she turned her phone on to look at the digital display—It was not even 10 a.m. yet!

She endured.

While Ginny was at that interminable meeting, our friend Barbara White and I enjoyed breakfast at Dave’s Dinner where we discussed the nature of time.

Barbara takes some sort of class at her church.

Voluntarily taking it.

Beats me why.

Anyhow, she explained that the word past refers to things that have already happened; that the word future refers to things that have not happened yet; and that we live in the present, right-now moment.

She compared time to the thin line cursor on my computer screen moving from left to right. That spider-web-thin line is the present moment. As it moves, it constantly creates the past.

She quoted the Psalm that says our times are in God’s hand. And she said we tend to remember the wrong things from our times past. We easily forget things God told us to remember, but remember--and dwell on—things best forgotten. We forget the good God has done for us, and remember the bad times in our lives.

I ventured my deep understanding of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; that the faster we move, the closer we are to being in two different places at once. The quicker you move from here to there, the closer you get to being both here and there at the same time.

Therefore, God must be very fast indeed because He is omnipresent, in all places at all times.

I love and find great comfort in St. Paul’s observation about time, “Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face”.

What a delight and wonder to look forward to!

Once years ago my youngest son, Donald, while a physics student interning at Los Alamos Nuclear Labs, tried to explain Chaos Theory and String Theory to me; I vaguely recollect that those theories have something to do with time’s nature.

And, in his February 18th post, my e-friend Jon in Great Britain (and the 27 people who comment on his posting) all discuss Christian concepts of time exhaustively; you’ll find them at http://asbojesus.wordpress.com/

I didn’t contribute to that discussion.

Thinking makes my brain hurt.

Like Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy, all I need to know is suppertime.

At present, all this reminds me of one of those rejected New Yorker cartoons:

Also, all this thinking about time eases me into remembering with a deep hearthunger longing what I consider the single most beautiful passage in the whole Bible, the words of King Solomon in Ecclesiastes:

To every thing there is a season,

And a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born,

And a time to die;

A time to plant,

And a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill,

And a time to heal;

A time to break down,

And a time to build up;

A time to weep,

And a time to laugh;

A time to mourn,

And a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones,

And a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace,

And a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get,

And a time to lose;

A time to keep,

And a time to cast away;

A time to rend,

And a time to sew;

A time to keep silence,

And a time to speak;

A time to love,

And a time to hate;

A time of war,

And a time of peace. ...

God hath made every thing beautiful in His time:…
And He hath placed yearning in the hearts of men…