My friends like to tease me when I post my Sunday blog past midnight on Sunday. I am running on "God's Time" instead of "man's time" because I see a day from dawn to dawn, slipping from one to the next according to the cycle of the Earth in His own cosmos. This has always seemed right to me, natural and real, whereas clocks and other timepieces (though, I admit, they hold a fascination and a beauty for me) seem pretense and even hubris. *Man* can understand Time? *snort* How ludicrous.
Of course... what man can understand is his own time, not Time but time, because he invented time. His time is simply a mathematical equation for mortality. It is a way to seem important in a universe that exists so much longer than us that we seem each a single matchstick burning before the light of a sun or super nova. We are small and short-lived. But man's time assigns us numbers -- seconds, minutes, hours, days, years -- and we seem somehow more substantial.
But then... by the grace of divinity, we disprove our invention...
I lay at your side. We are saying good-bye without words. The watch, abandoned on the bedside table, tells me that four minutes pass. But those minutes take longer than any years of my life combined. Those minutes make more of an impression on me, than any decades that have passed, filled with minutes. Those. Four. Short. Minutes. Then you were gone.
You stand before me. You hold up your hands and I lift you into my arms. You whisper, inexplicably, strangely calm, "I will miss you when you're gone." But I have just arrived. You are testing the definition of mortality because your pet frog has died this morning and the sadness of the truth of man's time -- that it is far from eternal -- is a burden too heavy for shoulders so small.
I am standing at a make-shift easel. The room is all glass but your eyes are the picture windows that show me more. I have always known how you feel but never have you showed me this gaze, this face, open desire painted on your features without attitude or aggression. It is a raw emotion both tender and wild. The Georgia sun is painting us with setting colors and as I lose the natural light I find that every movement of the second hand on the clock in this rented cottage is taking... forever.
Man's time is a construct. It is a schedule. A honey-do list. A way to keep us all in sync. Could it be I have found, after passing that quarter century mark which meant absolutely nothing to me, that I am, at my heart, a Christian anarchist? That I yearn so deeply for God's Time, freeform and beating, pulsing like the living thing it is, that there are moments... days... weeks... that I slip out of sync completely?
But I have also found that the more I let go of my honey-do list, the more I realize what honey needs to do. And off my schedule, outside my planner, I am actually able to get everything done.
No longer the child in the garden, I partake of the apple... but this apple is not one that God warns me against. It is simply fruit from His table.
Let go. Let God.
In His Time.
EJ
