I wonder what wakes you up in the morning?
It might be the rising sun leaking round the edge of your curtains. It could be the bird song outside the windows. If you’re fortunate perhaps it’s someone bringing you a cup of coffee. Or maybe it’s the sound of some relentlessly joyful DJ extolling the virtues of the latest single from a band you’ve never heard of when your clock radio reaches the appointed time.
Time can seem to be the thing that rules our lives.
I read recently how the rail companies in the UK were instrumental in introducing nationwide standardised time. As you move from East to West the sun sets later. If your clock is a sundial, you would have the middle of the day before someone living in a town further west from you. This wan’t much good for running trains. So in 1840, the Great Western Railway Company synchronised local times and applied a single standard.
Although they might well have been unwittingly responsible for encouraging a greater awareness of punctuality in the general public, the railway companies didn’t invent time.
Time is God’s invention. Open up a bible at page one, and read how God makes light to separate the day from the night, and time begins. The whole of creation marks the passage of time as the weather goes from cold to warm and then gets colder again. Crops are planted, grow and are harvested.
Read further on in the bible, and we find how one writer records that ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens’, and a little bit later ‘God has set eternity in the human heart.’
Not only are we aware of the passing of time, we mark it with annual events, birthdays, anniversaries, Easter and Christmas, we are also aware that we are only play a short part in a much greater story.
As a Christian, that story is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We should always have an eye on eternity, because God’s promise for all those that love and follow him is that they can be there to share it with him. If you’ve never thought about it before, now is as good a time as any!
(September 2016)