Time

By Jim Green

What is time?

Does that sound like a strange question? It shouldn’t. Time is something we have to deal with all day, every day. So, naturally, it can be disorienting when we consult physicists and philosophers and discover that time and space do not really exist. You cannot bring me a bucket of time or a pound of space. They are just concepts that we use to negotiate our interactions with reality.

But time is a concept that I can do without.

Time is a bully, a task master, a merciless boss always over your shoulder harassing you. We are always straining to be “on time” so that we can get somewhere “in time.” We must finish the project or accomplish the task before we run “out of time.” How can you run out of time if it is just a concept?

Whatever time is, I never seem to have enough of it.

The twin tyrannies of the calendar and the clock are usually about things that are destined to dissolve. The building I must work on next week will most likely not exist in a hundred years. That is why when we are speaking of something that has true substance, something of consequence, something weighty, like truth or glory, we describe it as “timeless.”

Clocks and calendars and schedules have always made me claustrophobic. The older I get the more claustrophobic I become. “Time flies,” they say. But time doesn’t fly, it hovers. Time is a ghoul leering over me, reminding me that soon my “time will be up” and that I should not be “wasting time” on whatever it is I happen to be doing (like writing this). “There are never enough hours in the day,” we like to say. Then let’s get rid of hours altogether. I wish I could go back “in time” and prevent the creation of the clock. Clocks are ominous and threatening; we even use the word “deadline” for certain times.

I may be dismissed as an old hippie complaining about modern life and refusing to grow up. I plead guilty to being lazy and childish far too often, but I don’t think that is what this is. We were not made for all this time stuff, and it is only when we slow down and step out of the machine that we begin to sense

how unnatural it all seems. I never want things to end, but they always do. Like walking on the beach with grandchildren, or driving alone through the desert, or laying in a warm bed in that half-dream state of comfort and peace that feels never-ending. But they all do end because the clock keeps ticking. When criminals are locked away from society they are said to be “doing time.”

Time feels like punishment.

I am told we are all at the mercy of Father Time. But time is not my father. My Father inhabits eternity. One day with Him is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. He truly dwells in the everlasting moment. He is “The Ancient of Days,” and yet He is ageless. He is timeless. We have been

made in his image, which is why we chafe against the transience of our lives. We know we have been made of a piece of forever, it was breathed into our nostrils at our birth. It takes years (time) to educate it out of us, but in our quieter moments it creeps back into our vision.

I would like to tell you all how to rebel against the tyranny of time, how to escape the machine and not just rage against it, how to reclaim the foreverness of the human soul. You could say that is the theme in everything I write. But I have to wrap this up because I am running late for work.

I guess I will just have to make time for that.

“He has placed eternity in their hearts” – Ecclesiastes 3:11.