TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
 

"God created time so that everything wouldn't happen all at once."
Scrawled on a wall in a cafe in a small, Texas town.
 
" .. Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end;
many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."  Daniel 12:4  (ASV)
   
     Most of us rather casually believe that we know what "time" is.  St. Augustine remarked that he knew what time was until someone asked him to describe it.  The question of what time is has puzzled astrophysicists for decades.  Whatever it is, it is clear that time is essential to life itself.  It provides a framework of understanding ourselves and the rest of creation, it provides identity, it provides security.  Without a sense of time, in an environment of sensory deprivation, for example, psychosis ensues.
     It has been noted that we live in an age when our time orientation is distorted by the speed of change. Between 1750 and 1900 total knowledge on earth doubled. As recently as the 1950's, total knowledge and/or information was doubling every thirty years. By 1996 the collective sum of all knowledge was doubling every four years and in the year 2003, stored information was doubling every three years. According to an IBM article in 2006, it has been projected that by 2010 the world's information base will be doubling in size every 11 hours. "The creation of data is growing at an exponential rate."   Technically, "data" and "information" are not necessarily equivalent to "knowledge."  Nevertheless, their trend lines would all indicate that total world knowledge will double every few hours by the year 2020.  
     The stresses that this supersonic increase in the growth of total information and knowledge induces on people can be enormous. 
     Stephen Bertman (The Futurist, December, 1998) maintains that, "Like it or not, we've all been drafted into an army, a peacetime army that fights on the battlefield of everyday life.  We wage 'time wars' to use Jeremy Rifkin's term: wars between the slower pace our minds and bodies crave and the faster tempo our technology demands. We are all combat veterans of such wars." 
     It seems that indeed we are close to "everything happening at once."
     The gurus of this generation have spoken at length of the importance of running faster and faster to ensure that we embrace change, and to some degree, that is what business success seems to require. More recently there are voices, however, beginning to repeat what is actually ancient wisdom. That is, that perhaps "change" is not the only value, nor the greatest value, of importance. 
      Bertman has also observed that we are approaching "a velocity that can warp our behavior and our most basic values even as it desensitizes us to the metamorphosis.  Warp speed disengages us from the past.  Traditions become incomprehensible and history becomes irrelevant.  Memories are a blur.  Warp speed plunges us toward the future. . .blinding us to what lies ahead.  Nullifying a vision of the past and negating a true view of the future, warp speed isolates us in the present. . .We fall under the sway of a new force, the power of now. . .The priorities we live by are transformed in a final act of adaption to electronic speed. As a consequence, our lives come to be characterized more by their random trajectory than by any reasoned destination."
      The new/old wisdom:
· Take a weekly sabbatical (a weekly Sabbath).
· Put time and energy into spiritual aspirations-as the first priority, not something way down the list.
· Meditate, pray, have a personal relationship and personal conversations with the Lord. 
· Regain your senses-"slow" is not necessarily "bad" and "fast" is not necessarily "good."  "Change" in and of itself is devoid of meaning. 
· Do not sell your soul to the "now."  Take time to thoughtfully retain history, and to contemplatively investigate the future by being a student of The final authority, the words of the Holy God, the Creator of time and space, who lives outside those dimensions. 

 

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Phil Swihart, Ph.D., is the Director of Counseling Services and Community Relations at Focus on the Family.  For more information about this wonderful organization, visit them at www.family.org.