Time for Something New
by
It seems we are always playing catch up with life. Time is seen as an enemy, when we’re feeling the lack of it. Time is seen as drudgery when we’re bored or young and a thing to accept or even fear when we are old. Time is a mysterious element that seems to speed up when we’re having fun and slow down when we’re not.
To ‘have time’ is a quality of modern life. That pearl of great price, that hidden treasure, that elusive grail. Time is a commodity which is sold at ever higher prices if you have the knowledge and power, yet time is also a burden if you have nothing but long days of illness, no prospect, no friends, no home.
To waste time seems to be a sin, to enjoy time a luxury. Does mastering time make us more than conquerors? Does serving time make us saints?
Into this mixed up metaphor full of inconsistencies and inequalities God steps in. At a moment in time – the God of all time – enters the world where time is the controlling factor. By entering into time he makes a moment, he begins a journey, he faces challenges, he embraces weakness and vulnerability. Yet this does not make him any less than God or any more than human. But entering time he is the reality.
Time is not changed, nor transformed. But understood and accepted.
To live ones life is not to fight time or fear it or even find it – but to acknowledge it and embrace it. Time become sacred for God is found now, here at this moment. Time is the meeting place of the eternal and things temporal.
Time then rather than enemy, become a gift, in which we encounter the Timeless One. If we live continually in the past or seek to live in the future, thereby escaping from the present, we will miss the extraordinary way in which God wants to meet us in the now.
The passing of time may seem arduous yet on the road to
Time will tell.
The Revd
John is the Vicar of St Paul’s, Tupsley and St Andrews, Hampton Bishop in Hereford Diocese. He’s also currently doing Doctoral Studies at Kings College London.