One of the challenges I have sometimes in teaching about spiritual things concerns an understanding of time–God’s time vs. our time. I’ve been observing lately how time is measured through the eyes of children as my daughter languishes on a rainy Saturday with "nothing to do." She is usually very active and social, and so when friends are unavailable and all projects complete a quiet afternoon for her is the essence of an eternal purgatory. I, on the other hand, see time as whipping past faster and faster the older I get. What seems to have happened yesterday actually took place a week ago. I get up in the morning and before I know it the day is over.
Being human means being sort of "trapped" in linear chronological time–time made all the more insistent by the fact that our mortality has an end. We’ve only got so much time, we say, so we’d better make the best of it.
God, however, isn’t bound by this time. For God everything is the present. Lewis uses the image of a novelist writing a story to describe how God views time:
"God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to him at 10:30 tonight, He need not listen to them all in one little snippet which we call 10:30. Ten-thirty–and every other moment from the beginning of the world–is always the Present for Him…
"That is difficult, I know. Let me try to give something not the same but a bit like it. Suppose I am writing a novel. I write, ‘Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!’ For Mary, who has to live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary’s maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary’s time (the time inside the story) at all."
When I read that this morning it made perfect sense to me and also gave me an immense sense of comfort. God is not seeing my life at the frantic pace I live it. But rather savors and thinks about me, wonders, hopes, dreams, plans–like an author writing a story. Now, you could see this as being very Calvinistic–God is simply orchestrating our lives. But I’d rather look at it as if God is watching each of our stories unfold in God’s Present, desiring the best for us and seeing each of us as part of a larger narrative. God considers my past, present, and future all at once–but moreover, God uses His time to think about me (and you).
God’s time reminds me, too, that life isn’t about simply living moment to moment in a relentless march into the future…but to savor every moment as a gift from the One who maintains my story!
