Gmail has a way of logging your emails which slightly annoys and befuddles me. I get annoyed when I am befuddled. It lists your emails according to how long ago they came in. Like 4 days ago or 2 hours ago or 10 seconds ago. Then it lumps emails in a string together and when you look at the list, it puts the most recent email at the bottom and condenses all the past emails. Someone decided this is the most helpful way to look at email correspondence and I suppose there are worse ways. Like Outlook for example just lists emails one by one and you can’t always tell which ones go together unless you are super efficient about coding or filing them to group together. I’d rather just be annoyed and befuddled.
This got me thinking about how we view life some times. We have benchmarks – this happened 5 years ago. That was 2 months ago. I have something coming up one month from today. We create distance and we associate time frames with meaning. It was 10 years ago now – shouldn’t you have moved on? That was when you were 14 years old – how could you possibly remember that?
The other night someone was talking about time and how it was created as a human construct (not the exact words, but that phrase came to mind a la The Matrix) – that time was fabricated. I disagreed. In the Bible account, God created time. He placed sun and moon to create distinct phases of a day. “And there was evening and morning.” He made phases of life, in daily increments, providing the light and the dark to encapsulate a period of time. He established seven days, six on and one off, making our lives a cycle of work – good, solid, enjoyable, Godly work – and then rest – sweet, beautiful, lovely peaceful rest. It’s been 3 days since I have had rest. And not so sweet or lovely, but peaceful, sure. I am at peace. I am beautiful in His time. Now where the heck is my coffee???
I have read in various places that when you stop grieving you stop pitting time against the event that happened to make you grieve. The accident was 2 years 3 days and 5 hours ago, for example. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all. I will never forget when something tragic happened and it will always be that reference point for much of life and I would never tell anyone that this isn’t “healthy” or that they need to let it go. And that seems counter-intuitive not to mention that God himself set up all kinds of markers throughout the Bible to remember. We set up a tent or a pile of rocks or we have this feast, all in remembrance. Remembering is in many ways the only way to live. It’s when we forget that we get into the most trouble.
There’s a line in Lord of the Rings “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost” – in reference to the ring. People lost track of where it was and all this chaos ensued. I have heard that Tolkien was referring to Germany and how it was allowed to stew for 20 years to create this new super power through the Nazi party and that, much like Saruman and the orc army, it grew secretly because the free peoples (of middle earth, aka Great Britain) turned their eye elsewhere. No one wants to believe there is impending doom and anyone preparing for doom is considered a bit of a lunatic really.
I am not going to get all political because I just don’t, and I am not going to try to draw some kind of deep spiritual warfare parallels here. I could go the route of we are all in a war and under attack and we need to remember the past or we are doomed to repeat it and so on and so forth. But the truth is that I don’t have any idea what will happen next and in many ways I don’t care. What I have learned from the past is that when I am trusting in God and praying for and trusting in the people who I know love and care for me and my best, then I cannot fail. Even when I do fail. and if that made sense to you, then you know what it’s like.
And so, I tell stories – even the ones that make me look bad – and I remember history and how far I’ve come from the dark days and how close I still am. And I strive to never forget the path it took me and the life I have been given through it all. And all this time fits together and makes the next chapter that much sweeter.
–
and this is totally disturbing to me…
the wife & times of Reverend Wootton 