"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die." -- Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

Today is Saturday. Duh! I wrote this on Wednesday. In between were Thursday and Friday.

Four days seem to be here one minute and gone the next. How did that happen?

Time will not stand still, and that is one of the most perplexing and frustrating facts we face as humans. I look at my adult daughter and wonder where the little girl went, the one who would crawl in my lap and read Dr. Seuss with me. I look in the mirror and try to remember what day gave me that wrinkle or what month led to the grayness at my temples.

We literally fight against time. We put speed bumps in its way by marking significant days and events each year. We yearn for ballast as we sing Happy Birthday or honor an anniversary, thinking we can halt time's march, clinging to that one day to remember.

I wonder whether some plastic surgery should be renamed Time Reduction Procedure.

I think this unspoken hostility toward time fuels the struggles we face. Whether it is the lack of time to make enough money to buy enough gas to travel to enough places or the boundary of mortality that greets us with the cruel realities of our finiteness every day, we all balk at time's insistence.

We all grow old. We all lose the battle with gravity. And the irony is that we only have so much of something that never ends. "It was his time," some will one day say of me.

But was it ever really mine?

At the heart of our debates is this slippery culprit, slithering through our lives (or our lives through it), refusing to take the blame or to admit to its sinister insistence. Amusing are the counterpoints that rage between the proponents of intelligent design and evolution.

If both sides would be bluntly honest, they are both trying to grasp the eel of time and make sense of the universe.

Ten million, five hundred and twelve thousand minutes ago, I read a book called A Brief History of Time. It was written by the renowned British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. In the book, he tried to help common folks understand the scope of the universe, creation and time.

It is hard to argue with the mathematical precision of the speed of light and the distances light must travel across an infinite universe to meet our eyes on a hot summer night. To think that the light we are seeing may be millions of years old is most humbling and, if you will pardon the pun, makes us pale in the sight of such a reality.

Reading again, older and with less time to count upon, I found myself asking again, "Where is God in this time conundrum?"

I'll admit it is comforting and definable for me to limit my quest of understanding to the Sunday school lessons of my childhood. That six-day routine and resting on the seventh just fits so neatly with my limited gene-pool intellect. And, presumably, I could stop there and live out my days until, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, they came to an end.

But my faith just won't allow me to stop there.

For I believe that inside each of us is something that defeats time, something eternal that revolts against the concept of a start and a finish.

It is called the soul, and it is the only thing in our lives that is not defined by time.

When Jesus instructed us to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength, he was pushing all of us out of our superficial creeds and faith and demanding that we use both our brains and our faith to grapple with the meaning of our lives and our relation to each other and especially with God. That would be the same God who is the maker of time itself.

The quest to understand or comprehend the bounds of God's action when creating this universe is by far the greatest quest of all time. But therein dwells both the reason and the resolve for the quest, the faith and belief that regardless of the "age" of our universe, it began with God.

Hawking reminded us that it was Einstein who reasoned that the universe was not governed by chance -- as represented in his famous statement, "God does not play dice."

Hawking, one of those trying to discover a complete theory of time and creation, built upon that admission of the presence of God when he wrote, "If we find the answer ... it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we would know the mind of God."

Or maybe we already do -- maybe we can already claim that ultimate triumph if we can slow down enough to believe that the words are true, that indeed there is a time for every matter under heaven. Including you. Including me.

• The Rev. Matt Idom is pastor of First United Methodist Church of Bryan.

Comments

(Requires free registration.)

0 comment(s) found!