Jay and I have always had a different view of time. I am compulsive about being on time, often arriving early to be sure I am not late.
Jay can leave home five minutes before a scheduled appointment and never break a sweat.
In times past, I would be at home waiting for him to arrive. When I called him, he always said, “I’m on the way.” It appeared sometime he had taken a 100 mile detour before he arrived, completely oblivious to the fact I had already imagined him dead on the road.
In sharing our household tasks, we have found our idea of time is quite different. What I think will only “take a minute”, he believes cannot be done now. “It will take too long,” he says.
On the other hand, when he says, “give me a minute,” I know I should probably settle in with a good book, because it’s going to be awhile.
How long is a minute? My father said, “it depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on.”
My father also made other observations about time.
He said, “Time is like wrapping a rope around a tree. When you start, it takes the rope longer to get around the tree. But the more it wraps, the shorter the time to go around the tree.
When you are young, it seems to take forever to get to your next birthday. But when you are old, you will think you just had a birthday and it is time for another one.”
How does God view time? He does not. While He has chosen mercifully to cut time into small bites for us to digest, to Him, time is seamless, uninterrupted, endless.
Peter said, “But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
2 Peter 3:8
And somewhere inside ourselves we know time is an illusion just now. We cannot remember all of where we have been or see ahead to how many measured bits of time there are to come.
But one day, perhaps, we will see more of the whole picture. God will show us how beautiful He has made everything in His Time!
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end!
Ecclesiastes 3:11
