Our Stories
Time for Some Timelessness
By Stew | posted 06/03/2010
"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace."
(Ecclesiastes 3)
I’m late writing this, so I’m not on time. Yet lately, I’ve been feeling time hovering over me like a Predator drone. Part of this feeling is just getting older and seeing younger people entering into times that I remember when I was young. Another part of it is seeing older people entering into times that I will soon enter into myself. On the one younger hand, I long for some of those younger times, yet don’t want to repeat many of them. On the other older hand, I’m getting a bit of a short-timer’s perspective on life, which is bittersweet but makes you value the moment a bit more and not sweat the small stuff so much, since even the big stuff starts to look like small stuff.
Yesterday, I read an article in Scientific America about the concept of time and how - deep down - it really doesn’t exist, and how our past, present and future simply "emerge" out of reality. (Follow me for a bit – I’m not completely loony.) In this theory of time, time is just a short-hand way of comparing all the different stuff in the universe, but really, the future and the past are just as "real" as the present. I think of this like a movie with thousands of frames, but all on one reel. Watching the reel gives us the illusion of time, but the reel is the reality. Each human being is a "viewer" of his own life in his own time. But all viewings of all the reels exist simultaneously in relation to each other.
As Christians, we look back 2000 years to the time of Christ, and we wait for the second coming in a not-easy-to-predict future. So we’re embedded deeply into both time past and time future, with Heaven a future place in a future time. But if God is all knowing, we’ve got to assume God’s a timeless being for whom all relationships of all times for all souls are all apparent and obvious.
Yet Christ was sent as a man to live in time on this earth.
Now, why I’m writing this is not because I think I have any big insights into the nature of "real" time. I don’t.
I am writing this because I miss my Dad. He lived in the time from 1925 to 1983. Two things recently reminded me about how much I miss my Dad: a poem and a newspaper article. The poem is by Garrick Pang. Depending on Facebook permissions, you may or may not be able to read this link.
The newspaper article was recently on the front page of the Seattle Times. It’s the story of Joe Lippi, who died 65 years ago during World War II’s Battle of the Bulge and left behind a new born son, Joe Lippi, Jr. (Note former Creeksider Art Mahler’s role in this story.)
My father died in 1983. He was a good man, a good husband and a good father. I was 29 when he died, my daughter two years old, and my son two months old. They were the only grandchildren he ever knew and he never saw them grow up. Thinking about that always makes me sad. It seems unfair and arbitrary
But I’m kind of thinking the timeless perspective on his life and my own is the right one. It’s a perspective that’s more consistent with Heaven and souls.
Unfortunately, in this world we’re still bound by time - whether it’s "real" or not - and my father’s life seems in the past. And right now, this second, I really, really miss him.
Stew can be reached via email here.
