Time

(This is a longer, more philosophical post. You have been warned)

For the past couple months, I have been hearing God's voice a lot more than normal.

The funny thing is, I have been asking for God to speak more loudly and frequently for a long time... for years, really. It's interesting how God waits to answer prayers. And it's interesting how we lose so much trust, faith, and hope when our prayers aren't answered in what we perceive to be a timely manner. I mean, if I was God, I would say,"You want me to speak? Well then let me just speak to you right now, here's a bunch of crazy stuff that I've been wanting you to know. In the sky, in airplane writing. There, that's about 19 of your problems solved, including that one about you doubting whether I exist sometimes."

It's really interesting how He doesn't do that, and how we just don't get it. So often, we just can't understand why He doesn't just speak now, or why he doesn't just heal us now, or why he allows growth to be so slow and often painful. Why can't He just finish us now?

My reason for writing this post is to communicate this: we do a lot of not understanding how God could be outside of time, but I don't think we understand time as well as we think we do. In fact, I think there's a part of us that longs for something besides time, as we know it.

We are fine with "time" until God tarries in giving us healing. We understand it perfectly until we begin to realize how strange it is that good things have to change. That fleeting moment atop the pedestal at the Olympics for Nastia Liuken when she won the gold for best all-around gymnast... it was awesome, but it's passed. She now has to look back on that moment forever. The moment that encompassed everything she trained for now lives on only in memory. It's not until time becomes our adversary that we begin to question it:

"Why do things have to change?" 
"Why can't I have what I desire now?"
"Why does God take his sweet time to address this area of brokenness in my life?"

God On A Different Schedule

Looking back at my life, It's almost like when I've asked God for something like more faith, or for him to teach me what it means to really love, It seems like He said, "I'm really glad you asked me for that. I'll put you down for a year and a half from now."



I don't know about you, but this doesn't always sit well with me. For whatever reason, the God who made "time" seems to enjoy operating within its constraints (go figure) by growing things instead of making them magically appear.  But I recently had a cool little epiphany: what if it's not supposed to sit well with me? What if part of us is made for another realm, where time is different; the realm He's prepared for us?

Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, "He he has set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can understand what God has done from beginning to end."

It sounds like there's a part of us that doesn't get time as well as we originally thought; and maybe there'a a part of us that understands whatever is outside time better than we think. I don't know about you, but I personally had a really hard time swallowing all the "forever" attached to God and Christianity. But now, it's one of my favorite things about God. Imagine a world where when something good happened, when you were in the most glorious part of your life, it could stay for longer than just that fleeting moment.  Imagine if something good never had to change!

I was talking to my cousin Marcus about this last night, and we realized why we've been so confused about God and time for so long. It's because we don't have the right vocabulary to talk about God outside time. WE are in time and space, a realm of constant change and motion. When I used to ask people in Sunday school how long God had been there, they would reply, "Well, Timothy, He's always been there." I went by Timothy until third grade. No big deal.

Always, huh? How does that work? Those were my thoughts growing up. But here's what I've realized about always: it's a "time word."  You can't describe something outside time with a word that infers time. If God's outside time, and we say he's "always" been there, we're just going to get more confused. But in some ways it's the best we can do, isn't it? It's hard to describe something that no one living has ever experienced, like timeless existence.

Often times God uses worldly metaphors, like "streets of gold," to describe things unfathomable to us; because he's putting it in terms we can kind of understand. Here's one such metaphor that helps me understand a God outside of space and time:

God, The Author

Imagine God as the author of a novel that He's made himself a character in. When you read through a novel, you experience time within the story, which is different from real life time. It doesn't matter how fast or slow you read, you still aren't missing anything you don't want to. You can read the same part over 5 times if you want; the rest of the story will wait for you.

Now imagine God, with His rough draft in His hand. He can flip to whatever page He wants whenever He wants, adding Himself in wherever He pleases, because He isn't constrained by the time of the book's storyline. In the same way we can do this with novels, it makes a lot of sense that God could plausibly do this with the story He's created.

This was Tyler Morris's idea, and I don't know where he got it. But if you're reading this... you rule, T-Mo.

Answered Questions

So when I see God as an author, and as I look into scripture, questions like these get less scary and more plausible:

"How can God be paying attention to and speaking to everyone at the same time?"
"If God made everything, who made God?" (Only in time do we need beginnings and ends)
"What do you mean, we will be in heaven forever?"


In Malachi 3:6, God says that he is unchanging. At the start of John, it says "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God." Which is basically saying before God made time, He just was. Or, as He likes to say, He is. "Before Abraham was born, I AM" - John 8:58. And finally, my personal favorite is 2 Peter 3:8 - "With God, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day." That one just throws time out the window... it's almost funny. I'll leave you to sort through those for yourself.

We definitely can't know everything about what time might be like outside this world, but it doesn't mean we can't try to create plausible and noncontradictory ideas about it!

It's easy to be scared of what heaven might be like. I used to be scared that I would be trapped in an unchanging picture frame after I died. But God's description of heaven is pretty awesome, and He made us; I think he knows we'll like it, whatever it is. To me, being anxious about heaven is like being anxious you won't like your Christmas presents when your parents can read your mind. They're sitting there saying, "Uh... we can read your mind. You're going to like it." Don't worry, it's probably not a picture frame.

Well, that concludes my philosophical rant about time. Let me know if you have any thoughts!

P.S. Young Life Leader Survival Guide will ramp up next week for just a few... more... posts...