Right (or Wrong) on Time

It seems every year or two, somebody claims to have figured out when the world will end. Often, it’s some evangelical preacher who, perhaps trying to make a name for himself, will venture out into the land of wild speculation and conjecture only to end up making a fool of himself. How any bible-believing preacher could ever make such predictions is beyond me. Matthew 24:36 should end that debate right away since Jesus said HE didn’t even know.

“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Matthew 24:36

The Bible has more lessons to teach us about time. It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around it, but time doesn’t seem to mean much when it comes to God.

“But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day.”

2 Peter 3:8

The fact is, we really don’t have a solid grasp of what time even is. A group of us, long ago, agreed to carve up the day into 24 equal segments and made fairly reliable machines to keep track of them, yet, even that is completely subject to our own unique perspective. Who is to say that what I feel to be an hour feels the same to you? What if 60 minutes of your life would feel like only 20 minutes to me? Heck, sometimes, one hour of my life can feel like ten (certain classes full of 8th graders can do that to me, for instance) and ten can seem like one. So the concept of time isn’t even consistent within a single person, let alone 7.5 billion. Native Americans don’t even see time as linear, they see it as circular. Einstein didn’t see time as linear either, he saw it as folded up like an accordion.

The fact that we all sense time in our own way can get us into trouble if we aren’t careful. It’s not just loony preachers who can fall into the trap of trying to corral and manipulate time. To some degree, we all can be guilty of trying to make time fit our own perspectives–and the results can be devastating. Messing with time can make fools of us all.

I recently had the privilege of accompanying a group of students on their class trip to Washington D.C. You are confronted with history everywhere you look in D.C. Often, different historic eras collide within one frame of vision and offer a rare moment of clarity regarding the passage of time. Our stop at the Martin Luther King Memorial is a perfect example. We paused, briefly, just outside the memorial, as our guide spoke to our kids about the many contributions MLK made to advance the cause of civil rights. As I stood there, I could look behind him and see both the Lincoln Memorial and the home of Robert E. Lee up on the hilltop in Arlington National Cemetery. From that one spot, I could see over into Virginia, a state that seceded from the Union and fought a bloody war to protect slavery, the home of the top general of the Confederate Army, the memorial to a president who tried desperately to reunite the nation while stopping the spread of slavery, and the memorial to the man who gave his life to the ongoing cause of securing equal rights for all Americans a century later. A century and a half of our nation’s sorted history of racial relations collided in my frame of vision and suddenly, time meant nothing–and time meant everything.

I had a similar encounter with the fleeting concept of time on another stop during our trip to the nation’s capital. As I worked my way through the Holocaust museum, I was consumed with one thought: History is like a melting glacier, not like a raging torrent. Atrocities normally don’t happen all at once, they build, slowly, allowing us time to acclimate to the parts before we are consumed by their sum. Because of this very human phenomenon, studying history can become problematic. We normally fail to get a sense of history in real time. We tend to splice together the events into a tidy story with a swift beginning, middle, and end and we lose the sense of slowly elapsing time that the people who lived through it felt. Losing that sense of historic time makes it easy for us to become acclimated to the present, too. We see warning signs, but when the story doesn’t build quickly, we become lost in it—and we are shocked when it consumes us again.

Perhaps the lesson of time is that we should be present in the now–to pay attention to what is happening in our world and look for ways to make it better. The now is all we have and it is where we have the ability to create or destroy–to hate or to love–to welcome or to alienate. We can’t control time, but we can control now.

It’s all we will ever have.