God, the Lord of Time

Tara Westover’s Educated describes her Dad’s frenzied labour as a scrap worker extracting value from piles of rubbish.

“Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky. In the anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel. Dad saw every piece of scrap as the money it could be sold for, minus the time needed to sort, cut and deliver it. Every slab of iron, every ring of copper tubing was a nickel, a dime a dollar – less if it took more than two seconds to extract and classify. And he constantly weighed these meager profits against the hourly expense of running the house. He figured that to keep the lights on, the house warm, he needed to work at breakneck speed.”

I don’t want that to be my heart. And yet too many days I’m tempted to feel that way. Planning my weeks and my days is a constant exercise in frustration. Invariably I write down only a small portion of the things I desperately need to accomplish. Invariably, my attempts at modest expectations are far too ambitious and I enter the following week looking at more than half of what I had hoped to complete. Rinse and repeat.

But this isn’t the only way I rail against my finitude. My mind won’t work fast enough; I can’t find the right words; I can’t capture the emotion I’m feeling or articulate the thoughts engagingly. I can’t decide what I ought to work on next or how to handle the new problem cropping up in front of me or how to respond with biblical hope when something doesn’t go the way I expected. I’m not strong enough, wise enough, motivated, creative, or loving enough to be anywhere close to the ideal that tantalizingly hangs forever out of reach. From birth to death I am locked in a constant struggle against my own limits.

And all of those limitations find their answer in the Person who has none. Today I take particular hope in God, the Lord of time who has never once double-booked or been held back by a schedule. Several meditations come to mind:

• Looking from the horizon of eternal time in the past, God existed forever in perfect harmony—Father, Son and Spirit. There was no waiting, no anticipation of a better future or aspirational investment to improve His status. He was forever joyful in perfect fellowship and needed nothing.
• When He determined to create, He had no need to plan the process, dividing it into achievable segments. He spoke and the universe came to be. He achieved everything in seven days but could just as easily have done it in seven seconds or none at all. Not once has God ever evaluated time constraints before beginning a project.
• Nor is my God limited by time in what He can know. He already sees my full life’s pathway from beginning to end. He sees the exact outcome of every unknown that I worry about. And so when I pray or seek to trust or wait on Him, He is the only one that can bring me actual certainty.

Those truths about God also help me better understand myself:

• The limits I struggle under are God’s gift—a gentle prod to pursue wisdom (Psalm 90:12) while the opportunity remains and a reminder of my dependance. I will die. I am not God. And I need a reminder of that every, single day.
• Life is such a constant ordeal, every 18 hours my body and mind demand a break. Even consciousness is too hard for me to maintain in an unbroken string. Every evening I fall asleep and for 8 hours I embody a reminder that I will die. But my God never sleeps. While I lie vulnerable and unaware, He runs the world. He listens to the prayers of people on the other side of the planet and prepares the sun rise.
• God has given me an inescapable reminder that death is coming. I see it in the mirror. I feel it in my knees. I notice it in the changing colours each time I sweep up the trimmings from a hair cut. There is a clear trajectory on my body and it isn’t positive. But my God never ages. In fact, He never changes. Unlike me, He is the same yesterday, today and forever. And that means that my hope and comfort if I find myself alone 75 will be the same rock-solid reality it was when I skinned my knee at 7 1/2.
• I will not always labor under the constraints of time or aging. Someday I will joyfully work and live and flourish in the presence of God without any sense of running out of time or a race against the clock. At frustrated moments I quietly wish sometimes for a single workday that could just go on indefinitely and in which I could—at least just once—complete my entire todo list. I will have that eventually, free from sin, free from the curse, and free from deadlines. Because of Jesus’ victory, I will also live forever in the presence of God. And I will joyfully serve Him with any amount of time I wish to lavish upon those labours.

Of course, the greatest contrast between myself and my Maker is that I am finite, created, bound by time when He has none of those bounds. But in the beginning none of this was a source of problems or frustration. It is sin that brought the curse and caused our struggle. Therein also lies our hope. Jesus has conquered my sin; He has demonstrated that it is possible to live as a finite human in a broken world and to do so well. Jesus was joyfully busy with His Father’s work all of His short days on earth, and He has now conquered, sitting down in the presence of the Father.

Because of Him I can also work today with joy; because of Him, I will also overcome and rest in the presence of God, the Lord of time.