Church Connections - June 2009

Time.

Albert Einstein declared it to be relative. But, that’s not the only thing we say about time. Why, just consider this short list:

“I’ve making good time.”

“I’ve got time to kill.”

“If I could only save time in a bottle.”

“I’ve just learned the best ‘time management’ technique.”

You’ve heard those expressions before, and likely a hundred others. And all of these sayings point to one reality: we all want to know how to use our time, and very few of us feel like we know how to do just that.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to an audio program from Mars Hill Audio. The topic of this specific interview was … you guessed it: time. The interviewer noted that a few years ago Forbes Magazine dedicated an entire issue to the topic of time – what Forbes called the biggest issue of our age. And inside the magazine, the writers at Forbes went on to say:

“We’ve beaten (or at least stymied) most of humanity’s monsters: disease, climate, geography and memory. But time still defeats us. Lately its victories seem more complete than ever. Those ‘time savings’ inventions of the last half century have somehow turned on us. We now hold cell phone meetings in traffic jams. And 24/7 has become the most terrifying phrase in modern life.”

That is an incredible paragraph. One worth reading again … and a third time … because in it a basic assumption is made. That assumption is that time is bad. It is a monster. It is something that we need to master if we are ever going to have any peace or prosperity in our life.

And isn’t that the attitude that shapes so much of our culture and our own living: that we must master our days and learn how to defeat time, to make it serve us? How often do you find yourself fighting a clock or trying to do so much in your day only to find that the day has “slipped away?”

Well, beginning on Sunday, June 14^th we are going to explore time. And this time we’re going to go back to the beginning and we’re going to go into God’s Word. And we’ll ask some important questions, like: Why did God create time? Does time limit us? Is that bad? Is that good?

I hope this will become a community conversation for us. I hope it will be a topic that spills out of our worship service and allows us to think about our individual and communal lives. You can begin by asking yourself: do I view time as an enemy or a gift?

I hope God uses our conversation to help us understand time as a gift, a gift to be received, not a monster to be defeated.

Wes