For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. – Psalm 90:4

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 30, 2012): Psalm 90

How do you see time? I admit that I schedule my weeks quite closely. I know that if I am going to achieve everything that I need to achieve in a week (including some down time) I need to be aware of my goal from the beginning of the week. And I am an on-time person. I believe in being on-time. I have a meeting later tonight and I am planning on being at the church early so that the person will not have to wait for me – but I will also have some work with me so that I can be productive while I am waiting.

And I realize that that is partly just because I have a western cultural view of time. A few years ago an ethnic group (African) asked me if they could use the church to have a meeting for a couple of hours on a Saturday. I have always felt that the church needs to be utilized, so my answer was yes. But I did have a conflict. I had a wedding to perform at 11:00 in the morning. The ethnic group wanted to use the church from 10:30 until 12:30 or 1:00 in the afternoon. So I told them about the wedding but we booked a room on the lower level of the church that would not interfere with the wedding and its guests.

The Saturday came and at 10:30, the group still had not arrived. The wedding guests had started to arrive and then finally the wedding ceremony started (late because weddings always seem to be late – most often because the wedding party wants to wait until Aunt Sally arrives and apparently she did not know when the wedding was supposed to start) and still the group had not arrived. The wedding ended and the guest left and I was had settled down in my office to get some work done before the reception began, and then the first few people from the meeting started to arrive at the door. By about 1:30, most of the participants had arrived and the meeting had started. But now I had another problem. I had a reception to go to, and this meeting, which was just getting started, was supposed to be over. A couple of hours into the meeting I went down to the room to tell them that I had to leave and that I was going to lock the door, but if they could just pull the door shut and make sure it was latched when they left, I would appreciate it.

At 9:00 that night I came back to the church to arm the alarm system, and the parking lot was full and the meeting was still going on. (It ended at about 1:30 in the morning, twelve hours after it had begun.) The problem was that my Western definition of time conflicted with their African definition.

I have a problem when we try to put God on a time schedule of our own devising. I do not believe that God does not understand time, but I do think that his understanding is different from ours. And sometime we even try to put God’s version of time in our own concrete terms, after all, a day to the God is like thousand years to us, but even that is not quite right. I think God understands my African friends better than I do, and just maybe his definition is closer to their definition than it is to mine. When we sing the old chorus “In His Time” what we are saying is that God moves when he sees fit. And he will finish his work when the job is done. And for Western minds like mine, I know that is tough – but it is his promise. And that is a promise that we can depend on.        

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Deuteronomy 1