The Times of Our Lives
I confess that I am nuts about clocks. Big clocks, little clocks, ones with chimes and without; I love them all. I think my love of clocks comes from my fascination with time. I don’t know about you but I never feel like I have enough time. In fact, I have been away from my blog for a few weeks because my husband and I remodeled our bathroom on our own; and there wasn’t any extra time to write. Each morning we said “this is it, we will be done today” and by midnight we would finally admit defeat and give into exhaustion. Three and a half weeks later we called it done; any guess what my first decoration purchase was? A clock! My family wasn’t surprised, and I bet you weren’t either.
Along with my clock collection I enjoy sayings on time like, “So many books, so little time” and “Time is not measured by clocks but by moments,” but my favorite Bible verse about time is Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” He intended that we would be interested in eternity, that our hearts would pull us away from this every day passage of time to our heavenly home where time will be meaningless.
But until then we live in the here and now, where time for us runs in 24-hour cycles.
Our days were set by God himself. In Genesis we learned, He gave us the day and the night to mark the passage of time. He reminded us we would have work to do each day but we would need to take time out for rest and worship. He didn’t mean it as a suggestion, but a commandment. A commandment that God observed himself; He spent 6 days working and on the seventh day He rested. Not because God was as tired as my husband and I had been at the end of each day during our remodel. No, God doesn’t get tired; this was done as an example for us. Because just as the verse tells us “no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” God knew we would need both a command and an example if we would make it through this crazy busy life in one piece. Just like us, my husband and I would get so caught up in our work, time would just wiz by, and thankfully night would come and remind us it was time to rest. At the end of each week my whole family would stop and observe the Lord’s Day and we would rest. What a blessing that commandment was for us.
It kept our perspective on what was good and right for our minds and bodies.
At the end of each day during creation God would say “It was good” those words were also a gift to us, an example to stop and appreciate the work that had been done. He could have spoken the world into existence in a moment, God is powerful and not limited by the physical body we have, so He didn’t need days. Once again He did this for our good, for my good. I was so invested in the end of our bathroom remodel I would get disappointed in the work we had accomplished instead of being happy at how far we had come. There were days (nights) when I was ready to throw in the towel; but God’s words “it was good” would ring in my ear and I would find the energy to work another day. God’s creation plan was not only to make the world but to set up the time frame of our lives.
As I look at my finished bathroom, and this completed post, I am thankful that God gave me time for work and time for rest.