Time

Time. It's a mysterious and frightening thing. As a species, we've given it life. We mark it out in seconds, months, millennia. We say it marches on, stands still, flies and even loops back onto itself. We've given it a face (father time), say that it laughs at us, and even has a memory. There have been books about it, movies made to explore its nature and its temperament, poems composed in honor of it's faithfulness and consistency.

The bible begins with a discussion of time, giving humanity a place to start, and it concludes with an extensive look at time's end. For such a widely discussed and explored concept, we still seem to know very little and we continue to be surprised by the multitude of ways that time can cause us trouble, joy, and catch us off balance. I've been thinking a lot about time lately.

None of us know how much time we've each been allotted. Some of us have a good idea that we may have less than others but, of course, only God knows for sure. I was in clinic yesterday with an eight year old boy and we were waiting for the attending physician to come back. There is an interactive activity center on the wall with the moon that you can make orbit the Earth and a space ship that you can turn so that it faces other planets in the solar system. When you turn the ship towards a planet, an opening in the bottom of the ship tells you how many days are in a year on that particular planet and how far it is from the sun. The boy started reading the numbers and asking me to help him figure out how long it would take to get to certain planets if you started from the sun. He pulled out some chalk and I got out my phone so we could use the calculator on it. Writing on the chalk board, we figured that it would take about 55 years to drive from the sun to the Earth if you went 210 miles per hour for 24 hours a day/ 365 days a year. We did the calculation for other planets and it dawned on me that no matter what planet we did the calculation for, we were still measuring by Earth time. He asked me, "If we moved to Venus, do you think we'd still care about our birthday's?" That question took me by surprise. I thought about that for a long, long time.