Time and Eternity - by Liz Carter

It’s my daughter’s eighteenth birthday today, and so I feel old that I should mudge a little on time, how it passes, and what writing does to it. That kind of thing.

‘I can’t believe she’s eighteen!’ - That’s the usual response in these circumstances. It’s like there’s a filter we apply when it comes to time passing; it can’t possibly be going so fast. It’s as if we wish time to be more fluid; we want to hold on to certain moments for longer while wishing others away. But it marches on regardless, unthinking of our own desires to bend it a little. And so time passes, and suddenly that baby is eighteen, and where have those years gone?

Time can be an unwelcome visitor, a pressure and a reminder, a heavy burden when we are short of it. When there is much to do and not enough time to do it. As writers we can feel its ever-present jabs at us: You need to get this done and that, this blog and that article and that edit. Or it tells us that we simply don’t have enough of it to do that thing our heart desires; to write that book at last. So we put it off and we fret about it, we curse Time and we scramble through it, never stopping to take hold of those tiny moments in it.

It can be heavy on those who have too much of it, as well. For someone living with a chronic illness, time can become something which drags, like chains around our ankles, keeping us locked in to the relentlessness of it all. We wish for time to pass more quickly so that the pain isn’t so stark. We wish for time to disappear while simultaneously wanting things to slow down so our bodies stop their degeneration. We just want to get off it all for a while; for time to become suspended along with our cries of pain and prayers for freedom.

There’s a well known passage about time in Ecclesiastes 3:

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:
         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 from embracing,
     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.

What do workers gain from their toil?  I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.  He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (v1-11)

It’s a bittersweet passage, chiming in with our lived experience of time as a place of both despair and hope. But what I think it does most of all is remind us that we have a God who stands outside time, in a great mystery, and who has ‘set eternity’ in our hearts. Perhaps time is such a burden for us because we are made for eternity, because all that we do and strive for only seeks to remind us that time is short but eternity is so much more than we can imagine, its borders more boundless and infinite than we can even begin to conceive of. 

How does that help us in our nows, in this time we have, this time which drags in pain or flashes by without stopping and allowing us to get off the train? I think that being reminded of our hope and our purpose – of our story in God’s great story – can perhaps help us to remember to slow ourselves down a while. To make use of those fleeting moments or even of those painful hours. Sometimes, it’s in the painful hours where I find God with me most of all, when I search and look away from me a while. 

Perhaps as writers part of our calling is to wrestle time into obedience. Even if only for seconds and minutes at a time, to take hold of the words pinging around in our heads and set them to paper. To remind one another of that sense of eternity which is in all of us, which we hunger for and long for. To join with the Creator of time, who has made all things beautiful in their time. What if our words can fling something of that beauty out into the world?

Whether fiction or non-fiction, our words have a great power; we can capture something of that longing, that yearning for more. Our words have the power to stop time, if only for moments. 

How are we going to stop time today?

Father,

Thank you that you created me with eternity in mind

And set eternity deep in the recesses of my heart.

Thank you that you give us times and seasons

And that you remain with us in the hope and the despair,

Making everything beautiful in its own time
Even when we can't perceive it.

Thank you that you are the God outside time,

The God of time,

The one who set it all in motion,

And the one who came blazing into time to shower us with a love beyond imagining.

Amen

Liz Carter is a writer and blogger who likes to write about the more painful times of life and how God is in the midst. Her first book will be published on November 15th by IVP: Catching Contentment. 

You can pre-order it here. 

You can find Liz's blog at http://www.greatadventure.carterclan.me.uk/