What Time is it Mr Wolf?

Where does the time go??

Apparently it's nearly a month since I last posted a blog. It feels like about two weeks.

Similarly the diary tells me I've been living in Romania for nearly two months now and will be going back to England for the baby in one month. It feels like it's the other way around.

Yesterday I woke up before my alarm. The alarm was set for 8am but I was nicely awake at 7.45. Hmmmm surprising. Especially since I didn't go to bed particularly early and sleep is one of my specialities. Good though. I love it when you get up early and get loads of things done. I'd do it more often but as I mentioned sleep is one of my very special talents. So, I now had two whole hours before I had to be at the office for a meeting with Wendy about producing a newsletter for Kairos.

I was having a lovely morning, eating grapefruit, reading, praying, listening to a bit of music when the phone rang at 9:28am. I know it was 9:28 because that's what time it said it was on my phone when I picked it up to answer the call. So you can imagine my surprise when my friend on the other end asked me if I was ok and questioned why I hadn't come to the meeting yet. "Because I thought we were meeting at 10am" was my genuinely confused and innocent response. Apparently I was absolutely right, we were meeting at 10am. The only problem was that it was in fact currently 10.28am.

I had taken the battery out of my phone the afternoon before and when I shoved it hurriedly back in just as I was leaving the house that evening I was disgruntled to find it had forgotten the time and date. It seems I proceeded to rectify this problem somewhat carelessly, and unfortunately the consequences were felt the next day. Not so much by me, I had a lovely morning dawdling about, but definitely by poor Wendy who sat in the office waiting for me for 50 minutes. I really should have been more suspicious about the whole waking up before the alarm incident.

Time is such a funny thing. They tell us it's a constant. But I often find it to be one of the most relative things in this world. Most other forms of measurement produce strikingly consistent results. The scales, for example. Even though I fain shock and surprise they are usually simply confirming my fears and dashing my weak hopes with alarming consistency. Whenever I measure out a litre of water for cooking it usually looks about the same. I'm pretty good at guessing people's heights and even distance, which can be a little confusing due to the different speeds of our available transportation, is usually pretty predictable once you have reminded yourself of your context. A 5 mile journey in a car is a misleadingly short distance if you then find yourself having to walk back. However once we have familiarised ourselves with each form of transport most people can make a pretty accurate guess how long a certain distance will take them to travel. My experience is that, even those who seem incapable of making an accurate prediction,....those who say "I'll be there in 5 mins" to which you nod and smile but automatically assume it will be at least 15...... even those people, are perfectly capable of measuring distance. They know it will take 15mins, they are just hoping to soften the blow of their inconsiderate lateness by making you think they'll be there soon. (I know this because I am this person....... I hate being late...... but I always am........it's another one of those special talents of mine).

But Time..........Time is different. Time is notoriously difficult to judge. Time is so relative it even has the extraordinary ability to appear to have gone both fast and slow to the same person. For example the last eight weeks since I left Haworth.......sometimes seem like an age. It's forever ago since I last walked the dog on the moors, since I saw my family, since I went to Morissons. I've done so much. I've driven across Europe, visited my friends in Switzerland, moved into a new house, furnished said house, made new friends, visited new places etc etc

But then sometimes.......it's like no time at all - Morissons.....pah....I know it so well I could talk a blind man into doing my shopping via skype without the need for video call. How can we possibly have been here 8 weeks already??? What's especially bizarre is that I am capable of these contradictory evaluations of time simultaneously!!!! Right now it feels like both a long and a short time that we've been here. And unfortunately this confusion rears it's ugly head with reference to practically every event that has ever occurred in my life......they were all so long ago and yet they feel like 'only yesterday'...... all at the same time!!!

I realise that I personally seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about time. "It's passing so quickly", "it's passing so slowly", "how much time do I have", "what shall I do with this time", "did I use that time wisely". I really should stop going on about it. But the other day when I based my day and my decisions on an entirely irrelevant time that I had, it seems, simply plucked out of the air, I realised again that Time is a law unto itself. It just ticks away. It doesn't matter one bit what time we think it is. It is what it is, all we can do is deal with it wisely.

I am currently reading a philosophy book called 'The reason for God' by Timothy Keller and he makes a similar point about God which is worth mentioning. God exists or He does not regardless of what we think on the subject. And if He does exist then He is what He is, it does not matter what we think He should be. It's an obvious point but one which seems to elude most of us post-modern thinkers. We say "well I think that if there is a God He will be like this and will do this" and if he isn't that or he doesn't seem to do what we think he should, we dismiss the whole concept. We then go on to base our whole lives on this decision about God that is merely a personal whim or preference, without really investigating our assumptions.

It didn't matter that I thought it was 9am, it didn't matter that I had programmed my world to exist around the assumption that it was 9am. It was 10 am. And that's the truth of it. If only I had checked some other clocks I would have known it was 10am. But I was so confident of my own clock...... the clock that told the time I myself had decided upon that I didn't see the need to check. And it affected my whole day......and incidentally the day of those around me!! God is or isn't whatever He is or isn't, we cannot dictate this truth or control it with our thoughts or preferences, all we can do is seek the truth and deal with it wisely.