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timehands“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” 2 Peter 3:8

My dad and I used to have some great discussions about the nature of time. He was a physicist and loved to talk about how time was not really linear, nor really confined to our human perceptions of it.

I remember when I was younger, ten minutes could feel like a life time. I’ve been waiting since forever, an eternity. One supernatural near death experience however, and you can re-live your entire life in less than a minute. Time can be a very subjective experience in the human world. Time flies, but time also drags. Sometimes, time ceases to exist at all.

Our clocks and calendars are not really accurate, not scientifically. They require constant adjustments to make them work. We have leap years, lunar calendars, and time zones. A day is measured by the Earth spinning  its axis, what we see as the rising and setting of the sun. Right now where I live, “a day” isn’t very long in terms of daylight.

Given the nature of time, I don’t worry too much about people who demand to know how old the earth is or those who claim God could not possibly have created everything in 7 days, or six rather. I certainly don’t get excited about those who shriek at me, “The universe is 13.82 billion years old!” Meh. I once spent 13.82 billion years waiting in line at a grocery store.

So in the Ancient of Days, before there was light…… we would just aim a network of radio telescopes at a distant quasar, kind of like keeping a stop watch running on God? Then the scientists who existed before the earth was even created carefully logged the progress of the universe? Or perhaps we went with atomic time, a second as exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium-133 atom?

Regardless, once the earth was made, the darn thing has always insisted on not keeping perfect time for us. It’s like a really cheap watch, most uncooperative. The liquid core causes us to spin faster…. or slower, at least in theory. This causes the need for more adjustments so we periodically must add leap seconds. As far as I know, we’ve never had cause to subtract a leap second. The earth apparently likes to speed up far more than slow down. The change is very slight however, perhaps in a hundred years it would amount to two minutes.

Of course, in a universe that is allegedly 13.82 billion years old, we’ve only understood these things for about 40 human years. To suddenly declare ourselves experts on the nature of time and insist that God Himself got it all wrong, is a bit arrogant to say the least.

There are 13.82 billion variables in our discussion of the nature of time, many of which we do not even yet understand. The speed of light is the fastest thing we know of and yet according to scientists who study the big bang, there was inflation, a time when the universe simply doubled it’s size in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. The edges of the universe itself somehow managed to travel faster than the speed of light. That of course is impossible, in theory anyway.

Impossible too, at least at the moment, is time travel and teleporting into another dimension. We haven’t even pondered wormholes yet. Warp drives. Black holes.

My point being, time is simply not written in stone.

“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” – Psalm 90:4

men in black