Our Time Is Not His Time

Do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 2 Peter 3: 8

The last few days I have had my son, Scott, and his wife, Emily, so much on my mind. Living several hundred miles away and they being so busy with work and life, it has been much too long since we have seen them! Texts, emails, and phone calls help, of course, but I just need to see those faces that I miss and love! Thankfully, it will only be a few more weeks until we do.

As you can see, I am much too time conscious! I count the days gone by and the ones to come before I will see them again. I am grateful for the times we share, but that doesn’t keep a mother from longing for more – or anyone else for that matter, who is missing a loved one!

“Are we all not so imprisoned by time? We can’t escape it.” Sometimes we feel trapped in a time frame when things are going badly, and then at other times, life seems to fly by much too quickly. And then when life is particularly happy, or we have only a set amount of time, we want to slow it down, or even stop it. We watch our clocks and calendars, and time passes on. We may feel restrained by it or wish to hurry it on, but either way it imprisons us to its control. We know our amount is limited and precious, and we want to make the most of it. As we well know, “Time waits for no one!  It marches on!”

I think one of the hardest things about God to understand is that since He is eternal and we are of this earth, we see time quite differently. His clock and his nature are quite different than ours.

This verse reminds us of how inconsequential the days and years are to Him. No matter how long a time interval is from our viewpoint, it is like the twinkling of an eye from His eternal perspective. While we tend to number our days, He looks at life for us as the beginning and the end, and then everlasting. In eternity there is no past or future, only the present. Time as we know it does not exist for God.

How difficult that is for us to comprehend, especially when we are waiting on Him. We know from experience that sometimes we just have to wait and be patient. If we could only learn not to just wait on God, but to wait with Him, it would be so much easier. Patience is not easy for any of us, especially as the waiting gets longer. But if we could only remember that God’s timing is not ours.

With us, time is one of the most important aspects of our lives – it can be such a difficult thing, or a priceless gift – depending on the circumstances! “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”  None of us know how many years we will have on this earth, but I am confident our loving God would want us to make the most of each day and live with anticipation of what is to come!

Even more difficult than trying to understand God’s timing is the concept of eternity and no restraints on our time. Imagine the freedom of knowing our time is infinite, limitless, and forever. It is human nature to not look forward to death, and very few of us can get excited about the idea of heaven while life consumes our days with loved ones, new adventures, and familiarity, and comfort.

But then when you try to imagine what God could possibly have planned for us, it becomes incomprehensible compared to our lives now. It’s just inconceivable because we have no concept of eternity. We can read Scripture and others’ perspective on heaven and try to envision its beauty and glory, and what it will be like, but we can never truly know until we experience it for ourselves.

As is written in 1 Corinthians 2:9, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”  With this promise, we can trust and believe that it will be beyond anything we have ever known or imagined! Maybe a part of us longs for it more than we even realize!

 Prayer

Dear God, there is so much about you that we don’t and can’t understand, and one of those is the concept of time. Help us to be patient and wait with you for whatever lies ahead. Thank you for the wonderful times with family, all those we care about, and for all the moments that make life so sweet. May we live our lives in a way that brings glory to you, and may we look ahead to the hope of life eternal with you. Amen