time

I have lived in Thailand for 3 months. Nearly. I actually landed on the 17th of August, and today is the 16th of November.

My housemate, Mary, is reading a book with the rather nonspecific title "Ethics." I was curious about whose ethics were contained therein, and on what they were based. Mary and I were flipping through the pages, and we came across this statement:

"Humans invented time."

After a little philosophizing, we came to the conclusion that this is false - that God invented time, and people invented various measurements that attempt to pin it down.

Time is so strange. Trying to comprehend it pulls my mental muscles. I have now lived in Thailand longer than I have lived in Canada, and yet by virtue of the fact that the 5 weeks I spent there were the first 5 weeks of my life, I have Canadian citizenship. It's not cold in Mae Sot at the moment, and all my previous experience tells me that November should be cold, so I am hard pressed to believe that it's truly November. I chose not to begin journaling at age 7 because I figured I had already missed out on capturing most things that would be worth writing. When I was 14, I found myself wishing I had started started at 7, and I determined that I wouldn't make the same mistake twice. The journals I started keeping then are now over half my lifetime away.

We span time with our memories of the past and dreams for the future, and yet we're stuck inside it. It's uncomfortable - like trying to walk around in shoes 5 sizes too small.

C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that one strong argument for the fact that we are eternal beings is that we don't feel at home in time. It's constantly confounds us because we don't ultimately belong in it. We are fish out of water. We were built for eternity, and our souls know it.

The flesh we walk around in now? Not so much. Though it has some beautiful moments, it ages and breaks down and dies. The time we are given here is so short. A blink. A blip. Infinitesimally minute.

"All flesh is grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever." (1 Peter 1:24) Puts things in perspective. The word of the Lord remains forever. Hallelujah! It is enough just to praise him for that.

But there is more. God has made it possible for us to be where we were built to be: eternity with him. Our flesh may wither, but we "have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God." (1 Peter 1:23) The living and abiding word, personified in Jesus Christ, births us into life that cannot die.

Right now there is a Karen woman from Burma staying with Marci. She has been widowed twice. Both her husbands were killed by the Burma army, leaving her to support her four children alone. She became so sad that she lost her will to live and stopped eating. Without nutrients, her immune system was weakened and she contracted tuberculosis. Her bones are visible through her skin.

All flesh is grass.

So our flesh is grass, but we are born of imperishable seed. Where does that leave us? With a choice, I think. As Gandalf wisely said to Frodo, "All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us." The bodies we have here wither in time, but before that happens we have the chance to invest in eternity. And the place where time and eternity intersect is now. "Now" is the moving window of opportunity where we have the freedom to make choices.

In that case, what is really worth our time? It makes a great deal of sense to me that everything we do "now" should be for the sake of Jesus, the word of the Lord, who remains forever.

The patient at Marci's house is now being treated for her tuberculosis. We try to encourage her appetite with delicious food. We provide a place to sleep and bathe for her and for the auntie who came along to help. We remind her of the joy of parenthood by loving Marci's children. We take her to the market so she can buy much-needed supplies for her own kids. We listen to her stories. I invite her to teach me new Karen words. And now I am working on translating a song of comfort into Karen for her, based on Matthew 11:28. "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." It is my prayer that she will indeed go to Jesus with her burdens of sickness, sorrow, and sin. For he will give her true rest in every way.

So it goes. We operate in the messy collision of time and eternity, finite and infinite, perishable and imperishable. We are reflections of the incarnation, ambassadors of a paradoxical Kingdom that is both already and not yet.

pitfalls

When the cable guys came to install our house internet service, they asked us to pick a location for the router. We chose a corner of the living room on the first floor. Then, as they began to set up ladders and bring in tools, it occurred to me that there was no outlet on that side of the room. The closest power source was directly on the opposite side of the room - a path that would require the cord to run across the doorway that leads to the rest of the house. Hardly safe or convenient. So I asked the guys (through a translator) to set up the router near the outlet instead, and explained that I didn't want a power cord across the threshold. They assured me there would be no such cord. I asked them to move again, quite sure that there would indeed be a cord problem. Again, they assured me there would be no such cord. I made one last effort, which was similarly refuted, and the router was accordingly installed in the location we initially chose. True to their word, they fed the cable through to the outside of the house using a hole they drilled in the cement wall. No cord across the doorway. I was satisfied with the results, and a bit embarrassed that I had hassled them so much.

The next day, an electrician came to supply the router with power. You guessed it. Not only was there a cord across the doorway, but it was an unsightly black thing that wasn't quite long enough to reach comfortably from one side of the room to the other. Mary made a valiant effort to get it off the floor by hanging it from hooks stuck to the wall by fluorescent multi-colored smiley-face plastic flowers - not exactly subtle, but certainly inventive. Those lasted one night, then they broke and the cord was back on the floor. And there it remained for a month of trampling and tripping.

I will not pretend that I wasn't annoyed by the cable guys' persistent denial of a problem they knew full well would inconvenience us. I don't know why they refused to change locations. But I think I might know why they misled me about the power cord. First of all, they were technically being truthful; they weren't going to install a cord in the offending location. Never mind that someone else would be doing exactly that in a matter of hours. Secondly, they knew that they would not be present when I discovered the arrival of the very thing I was trying to prevent. They didn't mind if I was upset as long as it didn't happen while they were around. As far as they were concerned, they had done their job and their customer was happy. Confrontation avoided. Face saved.

Fine for them, but not fine for me.

Meanwhile, in a different realm of the house, I was trying to figure out what baking pans would fit in my new oven. I found a shop that sold a wide variety of sizes, and I picked out something close to the classic staple 9"x13" that works well with most American recipes. I bought it and brought it home. Sadly, it didn't fit in my little oven. The next day, I was back at the shop. I explained my dilemma to the shopkeeper and asked if I could exchange the big pan for two smaller ones. He nodded in agreement, took the pan back, and gave me the two little pans instead. I figured I could bake in them side by side. I went home and was disappointed to discover that those pans wouldn't fit in the oven simultaneously either. "Ah well," I thought, "I can take them back to the shop if I find something better."

About that time, I went to a friend's garage sale. She sold me a baking pan that was just the right size for my oven. I was delighted. My intention to return the two small pans to the baking shop was settled.

But when I brought the pans back to the shopkeeper and tried to return them, he didn't seem to understand. He does speak English, so I was surprised at his confusion. I kept explaining, and he kept looking irresolute. He fingered the pans slowly, tilted his head, gazed at the shelves. He asked me if I wanted to exchange them for something else. No, I wanted a refund. He asked me if I wanted just one pan instead of two. No, I wanted a refund. Finally, he nodded slowly. He took the pans and gave me my money back. But he didn't make eye contact at all. He was beginning to look positively devastated, and I was beginning to realize that something wasn't right. My reaction was to thank him profusely, compliment his shop, and promise to come back again soon.

I found out later that refunds are not the done thing here. All sales are assumed to be final. Returning something and asking for your money back is an insult to the shopkeeper. It communicates that you as the customer are unsatisfied with the product. The product is closely associated with the shop, which is closely associated with the shopkeeper. My rejection of the pans was like a rejection of the person who sold them to me. No wonder he had looked so disconsolate. I got my refund, but the guy felt terrible.

Fine for me, but not fine for him. Well, sort of fine for me.

Oh, the pitfalls of culture collision! The surface ripples betray depths of difference. How can we span these gaps and navigate these hidden obstacles?

"Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love." (Ephesians 4:2)

Yeah. I think I need to spend some time soaking in God's grace. He is so patient and gentle with me, and to say that he bears with me in love would be an understatement. I do things to offend the culture of his Kingdom everyday, when I'm supposed to be one of its ambassadors. If he can deal graciously with me, then he can enable me deal graciously with the cultural quirks of the people around me. I am praying that they will somehow manage to forgive my inevitable foibles as well.