Time for the Hollidays

Matthew 24:22
"If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened."

Time is funny stuff. Jesus uses what sounds to me like past, present and future tense all in the same sentence...and it makes sense. To believers this isn't hard to grasp since we look at God as the architect of our universe, including time.

As I'm still here waiting on some updates to finish & everyone else has gone I have been thinking about this strange stuff called time. Is time unchanging? always marching on? never speeding up or slowing down? Appears so since no one that we know of has come out to say they have found a way to travel back or forward through time (although some pretty bright people on a Science channel documentary the other night said that while we can't do it, and we haven't been flooded with visitors from the future, and common sense says 'no you can't', that all their evidence can't disprove the notion that time can be changed...in fact they said that all their data says it can).

For me time is more like a river, with rapids and slow moving deep pools, currents and eddies. When I was young, before I started school, I remember spending days on end outside playing. The days seemed to last forever and the future was this far away thing that I didn't need to worry about. Then as I got older things moved a little quicker, though it seemed that in grade school from the first day of the school year to the last was like 9 years...and the summers like 3 weeks . In high school we picked up the pace a little, then college flew by in a blur.

I just thought that was fast...seems like the time from my children's birth to now, all grown with families of their own, has lasted about 31 weeks or so. I blinked twice last Christmas and here I am today.

Sometimes time itself seems to slow down: like the time we were on a mission trip in 1997. My group of 12 high school students and 3 adults had a week to roof a ladies house. The first four days time flew. Each time I looked at my watch thinking only a few minutes had gone by it had been hours. The days evaporated and we weren't making any progress. On Friday, with about 4 hours left, we had more work to do than we had been able to do the previous two days and I was afraid we were going to fail. I said a quick prayer asking God's help to get done what we needed for this lady. Suddenly time seemed to slow to a crawl. We were working like Trojans and meshing like gears in a watch. Looking at the watch thinking it had been an hour, only minutes had passed. We finished with no problem and the lady received a much needed roof.

Then there are the magic times when time stands still: our wedding, the births of our children, their weddings, the births of our grandchildren, the times spent meeting new friends like Allison & Brian and Russ and too many more to mention. The holidays are like that. Time spent with family and friends seems to last forever. When I visit these old friends in memories it warms from the inside like hot soup on a winter's night.

There are the dark times, when time seems like a prison: when my father, son, brother and mother died...each of these times seemed like never ending pain. The torment that lasted years when we struggled to make a business work, thinking we were stuck for the rest of our lives in hell. They all lasted forever. But, time has been like a blanket...smothering out the memories of the bad times to just a dim, smoky haze so that today, no matter how hard I try, I can't bring up the worst of these times in my memories.

Now it's time to head home. The Holidays are here. I am looking forward to this next stretch of time.

To all my friends and anyone just driving by: have a good time this holiday season and thank you for spending some time with me.