Day 4254 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Deuteronomy 32:35 NIV

What is time?

Down here we know it as a measure of our moments, the distance that a breath goes and the amount of patience it takes to get there. It’s something we measure in minutes which are both broken up into seconds and yet also added up unto hours and then hours themselves collect into days which group themselves together into weeks of which four or more become months of which each year has twelve, a decade defined as a gathering of ten years and ten decades into a century and a century about as long as any of us ever possibly had to begin with.

Way back when our unique portion of time was began in what’s since become a life in which said time has been running out thanks to our collective running away.

And that from God.

This is the journey we know as sin. It’s this choice chosen within to do contrary to what our Creator calls. It’s a heart refusing to humble itself unto the hope of a hope had later, seeking instead one nearer, easier, seemingly then better and that because, unto a people who know the grave looms, we feel this rush of doom whenever we allow ourselves to realize the brevity of our lives and how little time we’ve then left to sort through all that’s already left us to find whatever we’ve sadly come to hope we never will.

Indeed, our lives here have become time lost here seeking for mostly only all we’ll leave here when our time here is done.

A moment which comes and that closer within every breath we take which is measured in a second or so, sixty then roughly a minute, sixty of those an hour, 24 of those a day, seven of those a week, four of those a month, 12 of those a year, 10 of those a decade, a handful of those, at most, a life.

And I’ve already lived here almost four. I’m about two and half months away from saying goodbye to 38 and hello to 39. And as time continues to go wherever all the rest has already gone, I find myself reconsidering so many things all of the sudden. I don’t know if this is something that happens to everyone, if it happens around the same time if so, whatever another might know about how it might go and what more I wish I knew and didn’t know about the life I’ve lived and loved and lost along the way.

To where?

To losing it.

This has become yet another one of those realizations that never really leaves me. It’s that life here is something we’re all living to lose as this world in which we live is where we live to leave. And that moment in which we leave and thus our life here is lost, it grows closer by the breath. And yet we all continue to live as if it doesn’t, isn’t, some of us seeming to believe that it can’t but that rather we’ll be here forever, or at least however long our inability to believe in forever might make forever seem to be.

And indeed, to this I can find some reason, some sense even. And that’s because, well, all we’ve ever known for sure is this side of eternity’s shore. We’ve all always fallen awake into days spent on this side of the end. In fact every single day we’ve ever lived has both began and too found its end in this place. And yeah, we’re still here where time is measured as it’s always been.

And odds are then that tomorrow we’ll all wake up and measure it the same again.

But it seems as though the slow flow of time that’s been considered all throughout my life is starting to be replaced with a realization that it’s not coming as endlessly anymore. You see, as kids we don’t really worry too much of time as we’re rather entirely too busy living life and we leave the heavier things to those bigger and thus better equipped to carry them. We instead just bounce along believing we can fly and catch a falling star and rope the moon and carry it home, hang it on our wall and invite all of our friends over to look at it from time to time.

Yet as time goes on and we grow old we lose that ability to believe. Sadly it’s usually replaced by this feeling bereaved of that beautiful ability to hope as rather we come to know a life focused not on faith or fantasy but rather on deadlines and headlines and hairlines and fine-lines and long lines and late fines. And after a while of this new normal becoming our normal too, we just get used to it. We buy into it. We agree to it.

And all of the sudden time starts feeling more a foe than our friend. And that because, again, it seems that after you’ve lived through a fair deal of however much time you’ve been dealt, you find that you start to worry about how much you might or might not have left. And that’s because there’s an inevitably to time, an inescapability to the finite reality in which it exists.

A finite reality in which we start to understand we exist with it and it then with us.

And yet if one day time will run out then, well, I guess that means that so to shall we.

What then?

You see, that’s become anymore where more and more of my focus seems to find me. It’s in this middle ground found between looking back upon the past I know I knew and too toward the future that I hope I do. And it’s within this humbling realization of the past and how poorly I lived it mixed with the humility of hope asking me to keep believing for the better in which I do truly believe to still be coming that I find this strange loss of a numbing I didn’t know was there.

Because it seems as if, like a child, I’m finally after all these years spent as a grown up grown up within this dump we’ve made of this place He made to be a Garden starting to revert back to the simpler aspects of childhood. Granted, it’s a decidedly gradual shifting but I indeed feel it more and more all the time. It’s this yearning to simplify, to narrow down, focus in, let some things go and lighten way up on others.

And it’s because, well, I’m tired.

And not just nor even really the physical kind. Rather in regard to that I find that I’m doing as well as I ever have as I have this fire that’s been kept kindled and has finally started to reignite to within my life start doing better physically as I’m finally starting to work out a bit more than I have been in recent weeks. And too I’m getting my diet back under control after having spent roughly the same number of weeks sort of taking my eye off the prize as they say.

Indeed, I am truly excited about the way my life is seeming to turn as it seems as if I’m seeming to learn finally what matters and that alongside an ability, an opportunity, a desire even to do better by it all going forward.

All because I know that time isn’t flowing anymore but that it’s rather marching on and that toward the nearing end of however much I ever had to begin with.

In short I know we’re running out of time.

And I say that because I see every single day of this life a world in which more and more pretend they aren’t. And I just have this feeling inside that tells me that God will not continue to prove quite so happy to keep relenting upon His promised ending and that for all.

No, I contend that this world is pushing Him into a corner again and all but demanding He do something to show Himself to be anything of all He’s said He is.

Problem is that He will.

Kindness is that He won’t yet as, well, that’s what time truly is. Again, around here we consider it a measure of life. It’s the particular breadth of eternity’s endlessness within which we breathe this air. It’s the distance that’s been determined for us to go here. It’s the portion of this place that we’ve been given to be in. It’s the length of our life.

A length growing shorter and shorter all the time.

Why?

Because time is a kindness and thus, to us, something too easily taken for granted. And that’s because, well, it’s something that we’ve all continued to be given for however long we’ve been here. And, having each of us been here long enough to learn, in my case, how to write so as to write these things and your having been here long enough to have learned how to read them, or ignore them, it’s something that we’ve all been given so plenty of that we, at this point, are perhaps rightly justified in assuming is something He will probably keep doing.

And that we’ve awakened unto another new day that looks quite the same as the one we got to experience yesterday, well, this only seems to add validity to our longstanding assumption that time is nothing more than a measure of our life rather than the sand of the same which will run dry.

After all, He’s proven up until now endlessly kind in His having given us all all of this time in which we’ve all of us gotten to live and learned to love these lives.

But friends, anything taken for granted is likely to prove something eventually taken away.

Why?

Because why continue giving something to someone whenever said someone continues to both discount the kindness in it being given and even themselves choose to give it away to everything that isn't you? And, well, that’s exactly what we all, in some ways at least, continue to do. We take the time we’re given so extremely for granted that we continue to give it to everything that can only take it away.

We give it to jobs, to plans, to purchases and their endless power over us proven in their asking us to always come back and buy more. We give it to people and our worry over pleasing them so that they don’t do what some have done and seek to find our time find its end. We give it to seeking for and storing more of our treasures here poured in pleasure and pride. We give it to worrying about what to have for dinner and whether saying a certain word makes us a worse sinner than we didn’t care to think we were before.

Indeed, we give our time away to just about everything in and of this world and that because we’re too both in and sadly of this world but also because it seems as though we still believe that we’ve plenty left to find.

And maybe we do.

Yeah, maybe we’re right. Maybe we are just getting started at life. Maybe we do have years, decades left here. Maybe, if we do, then maybe we should continue to do whatever it is we have done. Maybe we have figured it all out. Maybe we are doing everything right. Maybe we don’t make any mistakes. Maybe God continuing to give us days is something He does just because He’s so impressed with how amazing we are at using it as is proven in how fun and enjoyable our lives have become.

Or maybe He’s just giving us all a bit more time to come back to our minds and find them for how mangled they’ve become.

Maybe He’s giving us a few more days to come to terms with how vastly we need to change our ways. Maybe He’s allowing us a couple more weeks to understand that we’ve become freaks who’ve so failed the faith that so too do we deserve to fail to find ourselves welcomed home whenever forever finds for us that home isn’t here where we’ve all lived thinking it was. Maybe who we were and what yesterday was because of it is what we need to repent from, to turn from, to return from and that to Him to whom we will return.

Why?

Because one day we will and it will be the last day we ever have.

And that’s because after that time won’t matter anymore as there will prove inside of eternity nothing that anyone can do to change wherever they’ve ended up and so time will only prove moot.

Time loses its meaning as soon as this world we’re found leaving.

Because time is only a kindness given us here in which to measure how long we’re here in what should become the understanding that we won’t be here much longer and that we’ve only been here so long because He is so incredibly kind that He wants for none of us to die, has since agreed to let some of us do it just the once and that, should we do it unto His Son, so too then shall we share in the resurrection said Son found on the other side of this hollowed ground.

Guess the problem is that we struggle to see how hollow we’ve left it. Instead we see only all the glimmer and glory we’ve mined from it. We see all the fun we still have no trouble managing to find atop it. We see all the friends we’ve made with those who too continue to choose to live as if they’ve all the time in the world to do whatever they want for however long they want and manage to settle for some deathbed confession in which they say they know Jesus and everyone who knows them says goodbye hoping they do.

We’re all down here living as if we can just do whatever we want right up to the end and get right with Him in that last moment.

And, again, maybe we can.

But friends, the problem is that we don’t know when our last moment will be. None of us know how much time we were given to be alive in this place and thus none of us know how much of it we have left.

But as the world goes the direction the world’s clearly chose, I can’t continue believing that He will just keep allowing us to keep on fleeing from Him, failing Him, forsaking Him, forgetting Him.

Rather I believe that He’s surely had just about enough of all this messed up stuff that we continue to do in which we continue to prove that we’ll take all the time and kindness He’s willing to give us but that we’ll offer Him nothing and none of us in return.

And friends, nobody will accept that kind of dealing forever.

Nobody.

Instead, as we read here, God is collecting within Himself vengeance that will eventually be unleashed upon all those who continued to live as if He wasn’t. He will show Himself to what remains a warped and crooked generation.

And when He does, well, we’ll all see both just how kind He was to give us all the time we had to get right with Him and how angry He is that we used so much of it to do everything else.

Indeed, though it may not seem the case from where we stand, the Day is coming in which our stance as has been for so long stood against Him will slip. We will fall from our every ivory tower and golden idolatry. We will all find ourselves both out of time and on bended knee.

Eternity will be determined by whether we get there willingly or rather by force only.

Faith is the gift that helps us find said willingness.

Time is the kindness given us to get us there.

Whether we ever make use of either is a choice that’s up to us.

Sure, we’ve all lived a long time in this world, as this world, of this world and maybe we’ve plenty time more to do that still.

Maybe we don’t.

I just put before you the consideration that maybe we should live as if we don’t because, well, our only hope is found in finding Him before we find that out the only other way.

Time is a kindness my friends, not an obligation that He’s obligated to give us. He has long proven patient, and we’ve long counted that as weakness. If we continue to do this then that choice is on us and we’ll thus pay the due when it comes time to. And yeah, maybe that time won’t come for a while more. But the promise is that death comes for all of us.

How we use the time we’ve been given before it arrives will directly determine what it brings with it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold