Time Gaps

How long is a minute? How many minutes are in one hour? How many hours in a single day? The answer to these questions is not a matter of opinion, right? There is only one correct answer to each question.

60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours. So, the concept of Time is rooted in fact. It’s unambiguous like math. 2 + 2 will ALWAYS = 4. Right?

So how come when we’re waiting for something we really want, time ticks by so slowly? Or when we’re having a great time, time zips by in a flash? For me, every minute in a doctor’s waiting room feels like five. Or how about sitting behind a row of cars in the left turning lane at a busy intersection. Especially if you’re the car that gets stuck waiting through another round when the green arrow turns red again? Or being three cars back in a drive-through line while they fill an order for a minivan full of kids?

In much of life’s real-life experiences, time seems like a relative thing. Take for example, the biblical concept of “waiting on God.” Doesn’t it often feel like God moves much too slow? Especially when you are crying out for a difficult situation to change. Or longing for a breakthrough to come in your life, or the life of someone you love.

The Bible is filled with promises that insist God hears our prayers, loves us with an everlasting love and has absolute, sovereign power over every aspect of life. Which is one of the reasons, I think, we often struggle with God when He doesn’t do things the way we think He should, or takes way too long to get them done. At such times, we can begin to doubt God or the truthfulness of His Word.

I think the real issue, however, stems from our concept of Time. Specifically, the way we measure it compared to the language of Scripture. The real problem lies within our expectations, not that God actually moves too slow, isn’t paying attention, or lacks the power to pull off what needs to happen.

God chose to reveal Himself to those who would write the Scriptures two thousand years (or more) before the age of technology. And to generations of people who, for generations, understood a very different concept of Time than we do.

The pace of life was set and fixed by unchangeable boundaries. It was a much slower pace, an agricultural pace. Farmers didn’t sow their seed in a field and go out the next day with baskets expecting to fill them up with fruit. They didn’t stare at the ground swearing because things grew too slow. Things grew at their expected pace.

So when they read, “What a man sows, he will also reap. Sow sparingly, reap sparingly. Sow bountifully, reap bountifully,” they would instinctively understand that a long time gap existed between these two events. In reality, it would be “Sow” (insert lengthy time gap) then “Reap.”

I don’t think modern Christians get this very much. We don’t allow for the time gaps. We set our expectations, somewhat foolishly, on modern sensibilities. Which is why we’re so often frustrated, and why we suffer so much anxiety when unpleasant things happen and seem to keep on happening for much too long.

We want what we want now. We want the situation fixed now. We want the path to be clear now. We don’t want to spend any time living with uncertainty. We want clarity. We want answers. “God, you promised to make the rough places smooth and the crooked ways straight. Well, they still look pretty rough and pretty crooked to me.”

So many promises like that are in the Bible, and they are still true. But there are time gaps assumed and implied that we, because of our modern concepts of time, fail to see.

Why do these time gaps exist? What is happening during this time when it seems like nothing is happening at all? I don’t know. But I also don’t know what is happening below the ground when seeds are sown. What they do, the process they undergo day by day, which eventually results in a plant pushing forward into the sunlight, eventually maturing to the place that fruit begins to appear, and that fruit ripening to the point that we can eat it.

I suppose God is doing things like that “beneath the ground” as He works all things together for good in our lives.

How about you? Struggling with any time gap issues at the moment? Any stories to tell where God’s wisdom and faithfulness were proven right (even though it seemed He took way too long at first)?

(NOTE: To read the other posts in this devotional feature of my blog, select “Perfect Peace – Hope for the Weary Soul” in the Category section.)

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