Saving time

Time seems especially short in December. Gifts to buy and make and wrap. Packing and traveling, maybe, extra cleaning and food prep. Parties to attend, or regret. Parties to attend and regret. 

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St. Paul tells us to redeem time. Or we could translate it, to redeem the moments.

Redeem, as in a pawn shop. You pay to recover something.

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I’ve read more books than I care to remember on time efficiency. Until I got sick, I was the queen of multi-tasking. 

Redeem is different. Redemption, in the New Testament, changes the nature of a thing.

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Redeem the time, Paul says, for the days are evil. The word translated evil was often used to describe days like so many of ours: full of work and annoyances, of trouble and pain. 

It can also have a moral, ethical sense. Evil. Bad. 

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“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” wrote Shakespeare,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

Today is a gift. And today brings us another step closer to our graves.

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The Incarnation: the intersection of humanness and Godness. 

And the Word became a human being. 

In Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. 

The Incarnation: the intersection, the collision, of human time and God’s eternity The Incarnation makes it possible to access the infinite life of eternity in the portal of this ticking moment.

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(20th Century Studios)

I love this Mission Impossible opening: the team interrogating some guy in a tiny, tawdry motel room. Suddenly they drug him and push back the walls to reveal vast and unsuspected space all around. I get goosebumps every time.

It reminds me that these four walls are just a tiny part of Reality.  As are the ground beneath our feet and the sky overhead and all that we can see.

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Those long, slow B-movie sequences: the huge alien mother-ship gliding into view over the skyline. The camera cuts to action down below in the city streets. Another glimpse of the spacecraft, coming, coming. Then the streets. The spacecraft. Even at the end of the sequence, we still see just a corner of the spacecraft.

* * *

A thousand years in Your sight
Are as yesterday when it is past,
Or as a watch in the night.

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The coming of infinite Love is an infinite coming. God walks in the Garden in the evening breeze. Lives in a tent in the middle of the camp. Is birthed by a girl in a stable. Swirls into a room like wind and fire. God comes and comes and comes to us, relentless and patient as the ocean.

The Lamb slain before the foundation of the world was born in Bethlehem, is aborning now, here, in this moment (in which I’m writing, in which you’re reading). In each moment. Every moment. There has never been a moment of my life, there will never be a moment of yours, in which God is not present, is not coming. In which we are not waiting for the One who is here.