On Time

 

Relax if you are given to tardiness. This isn’t a piece on the importance of punctuality. Rather, I want to reflect on our relationship to time itself. Although it has to be said that time isn’t an easy thing to define. Early Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo puzzled over the question ‘What is time?’ saying,  ‘If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.’ All he could say is that some events lie behind us in the past and some lie ahead of us in the future. If nothing at all existed there would be no present.

 Augustine proposed that God did not make the universe in time, but with time. God is eternal, existing outside of time. He didn’t wait around for ages before creating the world. The clock only started ticking as it were at the beginning of creation. Modern cosmology tends to agree on that point. Anyway, the thing is that we exist in time. Our lives are constantly moving from the past, through the present and into the future.

The trouble is that these days people only seem interested in the present. The past isn’t worth thinking about. People did bad stuff back then. Slavery and that. The future will have to look after itself. In 2010 Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg dismissed the idea of building more nuclear power stations as they wouldn’t be good to go for another ten years. I mean, who cares what happens in the 2020s? Maybe it’s apt that after a career in politics Clegg went to work for Facebook/Meta.

Social media tends to make us focus on the present moment, rather than the past or the future. What’s going on now captivates out attention, no matter how trivial. This is an age of momentary celebrity and throwaway fashion. Why bother with the time-consuming process of saving for major purchases? Much easier to take out instant credit to buy on a whim something that flashed before our eyes in an online ad.

There’s no escaping time, however. We are all products of our past experiences. What we decide in the present will impact on how we fare in the future. But our history need not be our destiny. God entered our world of time and space in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. He came to die on the cross that our past sins and failings may be forgiven. He rose from the dead that those who believe in him may have the hope of everlasting life. God gives us time to seek him while he may be found and call upon him while he is near. 

*For various local magazines