Tag: time

When Time Shall Be No More

Tomorrow will be two years since my life was changed forever, 731 days since my heart was shattered, 17,544 hours since Dominic’s accident.

I never dreaded time the way I do now.  Gray hair and wrinkles didn’t faze me.  My children growing from babies to toddlers to high school graduates was exciting, not sad.

But now, I am oh, so aware, of the days and months that have passed since Dominic left us.  I look back to the years we had with him and hate to see them falling further and further into the past.

I look ahead  with ambivalence to the years that may lie between now and my reunion with the son I love and miss.

The Bible describes Heaven as a place where “time will be no more” and I’ve always considered that concept in terms of an unending opportunity to enjoy Jesus and those we love for ever and ever.

But something occurred to me the other day:  timelessness itself will be a gift unimaginable.

In this body, I am bound in time.  My life is divided into “before”  and “after”.  But there will be a day when it won’t be.

There will be a day when I will also inhabit the timeless eternity where Jesus reigns and Dominic resides.

I don’t know if I will remember the details of this life, the pain and the heartache-maybe, because Scripture tells me that God will wipe away every tear-but I firmly believe that I will be able to enter fully into the “now” of heaven’s timelessness without a sense of loss.

I will be free from this body of sin and death, free from the burden of grief and pain, free of the weight of sorrow.

For ever and ever. Amen.

Nothing that has cursed mankind shall exist any longer; the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be within the city. His servants shall worship him; they shall see his face, and his name will be upon their foreheads. Night shall be no more; they have no more need for either lamplight or sunlight, for the Lord God will shed his light upon them and they shall reign as kings for timeless ages.

Revelation 22:3-5 Phillips

Gifts of Spring

I spend a lot of time outdoors and love to notice the small details that announce the changing seasons.

Just a week ago I began to see tiny purple flowers peeking through the winter brown and heralding Spring’s return. Yesterday I found the first shy violets lifting their heads and today green has spread across the pastures overnight until it fills more space than the drab gray patches left over from last year’s bounty.

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It is a good thing that the earth still turns and the seasons still roll.  It is a reminder of God’s faithfulness to His promise:

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” Genesis 8:22 NIV

New flowers, new life, longer days, brighter sunshine are gifts.

But they are also a reminder that another season has passed, another calendar page has been torn off, another year has rolled by without the companionship of the child I love.

One of the things I am learning in this grief journey is that pain and joy, gladness and sorrow, hope and regret will forever be mixed in the marrow of my bones.  Every smile will carry with it a tinge of sadness.  Every new memory made will conjure up an old one undone.

And this is a gift as well.

Contrast sharpens the edges of everything.  And death makes life more precious.

Now that I know, by experience, breath is fleeting and that no matter how carefully I plan, the future is not in my hands, I am free to live and love and inhale the fragrance of this one sacred moment because there just might not be another.

 And now I have a word for you who brashly announce, “Today—at the latest, tomorrow—we’re off to such and such a city for the year. We’re going to start a business and make a lot of money.” You don’t know the first thing about tomorrow. You’re nothing but a wisp of fog, catching a brief bit of sun before disappearing. Instead, make it a habit to say, “If the Master wills it and we’re still alive, we’ll do this or that.”

James 4:13-15 MSG

 

 

Spring Forward

I wrote and first posted this last fall,  when we ended Daylight Savings Time.  It struck me then, and strikes me now, that we continue to think that time is in our hands.  We break days into hours and hours into minutes like they belong to us.

But no one knows the number of our days except God.

“Every spring and every fall we dutifully make the rounds to our clocks and digital devices, putting them first forward an hour and then back in an attempt to make the days “longer”.

As if time was in our hands.

The sun rises and sets according to the Creator’s schedule, we can neither speed the world’s turning, nor slow it down.

We can only choose whether to be present in the moments He grants us.”

Read the rest of this post here:  Time Change