But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. 2 Peter 3:8
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in the United States for seven months. It’s hard to believe that I’m going to be in Papua New Guinea for another couple of years. Every time I come or go, the world left behind trickles into timelessness—close to my heart, yet always just beyond my grasp and I struggle for clarity. I hate it. Was that only days ago? Or...years?
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| image courtesy of www.wallpaperswala.com |
Time is a strange thing. It flies, it crawls, it’s counted, it’s spent, it’s wasted, it’s saved, it can be found and it can be lost, it can be set aside and it can be squandered, but in reality, we never know what to do with it. It catches us off guard, surprising us and chasing after us, as if we were foreigners struggling with a different language or a different food, eventually becoming acclimated, but never fluent—as if, we weren’t meant for time. Master and servant, precious and hated, we count down those twenty-four hours, or 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds—and wonder at what could be beyond the ticking of the clock.
Outside of time, He stands (or perhaps time is inside of Him), a place where past, present, future become as meaningless as if starfish tried to describe the sky. Thousand years or one day? The equation balances into equal importance.
Two thousand years ago, or, by this new reckoning, two days ago, Jesus walked the earth. He was three days in the tomb, and Jonah spent three nights in the whale—three thousand years, an agony for them! Time breaks under eternity’s weight like a sieve, and days are hung with thousands of years like washing left on the line—the day my sister took her 33rd step, or Napoleon was crowned emperor, or my mother thanked the mailman, or I left for Papua New Guinea, or Jesus died.
A year here—minutes there. I ache with the effort of this time-bound land. Eternity seems so slow in coming. For out there, the clock is silent.
And yet, He reaches in, scoops up earth, and speaks light into being.
God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. Genesis 1:5
And I wonder...what might He do tomorrow?
