I’ve been thinking a lot this week about time, and the different ways it exists.
First, there is the rather arbitrary way that we measure time, independent of the natural world: things happen on the first or last day of the month, or every two weeks, or the second Tuesday of November. These things have significance for us no matter what nature is doing. Pay day every two weeks is pay day, no matter what the weather is like.
Compare that to the mysteriousness of nature’s time: the changing of the seasons, the cycles of the moon, or the length of time it takes for a sequoia to grow from a seedling. These processes have little (no) regard for the way we measure time. The leaves fall when they are ready, the rain starts when the clouds roll in, and so on.
But you know, even these cycles follow some sort of discernible pattern. Seasons change with some regularity, and repeat pretty consistently. Compare that to the completely unknowable nature of God’s time. Take Christmas: what a completely random (to us) time and place for an event so cataclysmic. It renders our own attempts to put order to it meaningless. I’m pretty sure that the people present that night didn’t know or care that we would someday think of that time in terms of B.C. or A.D.
I love Advent, because it allows us to create the space to think about these mysteries. All the things we think we have control over (the way we measure time) and all the things we think we know (nature’s time) give way to the absolute mystery of God’s time. It allows us to surrender, to wait in hope for something over which we have no control.
Over the next few weeks, a few of us here at A Rocha USA will be posting a series of short meditations on the waiting, in preparation for the celebration of Christmas. Let’s take some time together to think about these mysteries, and let that wonder turn to hope.
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