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.