Time

We’re all slaves of time. God does not wear a watch, does not own a calendar, but in our uncertain earthly lives (and we are the only animal who know we will die) it is important to make every minute of every day count. And in our activities of finance and acquisitions, it is far better to make numbers count than to count numbers.

Some years ago, one of my now deceased friends called and asked me a most interesting question. His wife had been married previously and her husband had died. He asked, “In heaven, will my wife be with me or with her former husband?” I happened to know that my friend did not profess or possess any faith at all, that he never went to a church, and had very little to do with church people.  I said to him, without any type of explanation, “Dick, I don’t think you will have anything to worry about.”

A Lutheran minister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, said early in his life that a Christian is born to face death and time is of the essence, because not one knows how long our life will be. We are always just one breath away from eternity. The last breath here, the first breath there.

Recently, a public official in North Carolina, a member of the counsel of state for twenty-four years, who I am sure expected a wonderful retirement, was buried two weeks after he retired.  This week, a plane went down near Buffalo, New York, and fifty people who, too, only had one life to live, and who expected to greet a loved one at the airport, died in a ball of flame.

I have often described eternity the following way. I have a nice house right on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean (Wrightsville Beach, NC). If I were to walk down to the beach from my house, take up one grain of sand, and each step took 10,000 years in time duration, walk completely across the 2,000 miles of this nation, each step 10,000 years, climb Mt. St. Helens, drop the grain of sand on the mountain, and then return the same trip 10,000 years each step, remove every grain of sand from the Atlantic coast using the same time frame, 10,000 years for each step, every grain of sand from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and every other beach and desert of the world, eternity would just be beginning. When you reach my age, and you realize just how short life is, you know the reality of the redemption afforded by Almighty God in extending to a mere mortal the eternity of time.

My ancestors were the early founders of the Free Will Baptist denomination. Even though God is all-knowing and knew our lives completely, we still have the Free Will to make decisions that determine our destination. A much earlier Baptist denomination, the Primitive Baptists, in my opinion, were Calvinists in their interpretations and believed that an all-knowing God predestined everything.

My father enjoyed telling about his experience with one of my Primitive Baptist uncles, a large landowner, who he accompanied to the courthouse to pay his extensive taxes. On leaving the courthouse, my uncle’s foot slipped on ice at the top of the steep courthouse steps and he rolled all the way down to the bottom of the marble steps. My father said his uncle got up off the walkway and said, “I’m glad that’s over.”

The Calvinists, the Presbyterians, the Primitive Baptists, and others spiritually had a different concept of time.

"For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God." Galatians 2:19

I have visited Darjeeling, India twice in my life. It is located at the foot of Mt. Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. Each time, women carried our luggage on their backs, up a hill, to the Everest Hotel, where most people stay, and where the rooms are still heated by burning wood in fireplaces, and hot water for bathing is taken to your room by your room attendant. Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mt. Everest. He, like the women who climbed the hill each time with my luggage, only was given so much time on this earth.

There are 86,400 seconds in a twenty-four hour day. The Queen of England is reportedly worth three trillion dollars. When her final day on Earth comes, when her time is up, she does not have enough money to buy one more second. This is the importance of time. We should make every second count. Theologian Calvin who lived in Geneva, had bad health his entire life, crippled and in pain before his death he wrote, “ every bruise is for the glory of God.”