Time

 I've started to write this three times already and can't quite settle on what it is I want to say.  It's something about our perception of time and how it rules our lives.   

Im working night shift on the day the clocks have gone forward.  So my internal clock is going to be well and truly messed up for a few days hence.   I will go to bed when everyone is waking up and sleep most of the day then try to go to bed at normal bedtime and try to sleep then too.  I will feel as though it is breakfast time at tea time and it will take two or three days for everything to work its way back to the normal diurnal routines.

Found my house on Google!

I've been thinking about this alongside thinking about the town in which I grew up ( School reunion talk tends to take you back there)  Oundle in Northamptonshire is an ancient market town and most of the center was built in the Tudor period.  Mary Queen of Scots stayed in the town's Talbot Hotel apparently on her way to be executed.  The house of my teenage years was an 18th century coaching inn.  All low beams and inglenook fireplaces and winding passageways with a cellar.  When I left home I went to study at St Andrews University, established in the 1400s and another town full of historical buildings and ancient ways.   Living in these sort of places makes you acutely aware of those who have gone before.  In St Andrews I used to walk daily past the place where people were burned at the stake for believing in the trinity.  And it was only a few hundred years ago.  Maybe seven lifespans ago.  Which isnt all that long is it really?

Time marches on.  Time is a great healer.  Time flies.  Don't waste time. Spend time. Take time.   The 1600s seem to be a long time ago - but then so do the 1920s.  So much of our life is spent thinking about, talking about and dealing with the passage of time.  I wonder why.  Perhaps it is because God has set eternity in our hearts and we know deep down that this temporal world is not where we belong.        ( Ecc 3:11)   When I think about eternity I see a ruler suspended in space.  The ruler is time.  It has a beginning, it has and end; we are all born at some point on the ruler - maybe at 20cm along, or 40 cm along or 100cm along.  We can only see the place on the ruler we are standing.  But the ruler is just a 

small thing in the vast expanse of space which surrounds it - eternity.   At some point we shall step off the ruler and into what is beyond it.  And I hope we will get to look back on the ruler and see everything that has happened from the beginning right to the end.  Jesus completely surrounds and envelops and holds time in His hand.  ( He depicted it more as an alphabet than a ruler, saying that He was at the beginning and the end. ) In the light of eternity that ruler is going to seem so insignificant - and yet it is the very place that Jesus chose to inhabit.  Folding Himself up into a tiny embryo and entering into a womb in a woman in a time on that timeline.  It is an amazing mystery - how does the eternal become temporal?  How does one who is uncreated become created? 

The moral of todays ponderings is this.  Time is mostly a human construct and probably largely an irrelevance in the light of eternity.  All the effort we put into trying to stay alive longer, not waste the minutes, regretting the past and planning for the future is largely pointless. We will all have the days and years allotted to us by the One who sees the whole span of History in a glance.  The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.  Perhaps if we just focus on that, the rest of it will look after itself ?😊