It's Just a Matter Of Time

[HKHaugan]

There is a TV ad showing a guy with a hooded sweatshirt driving with his wife and discovering he left his sunglasses behind somewhere. He goes back to look for them. One place is a cave. He goes in and quickly emerges in the midst of flurrying bats causing him to put his hood on. There they are. He finds them in his hood. They were there all the time.

The last place you would think to look is where you find what you lost. This is a common occurrence for many of us. If we really look in the mirror of our experience what was it we lost, overlooked or maybe discarded on the road of our past consciousness? Usually it is something that gave us a jolt, an awakening, a sense of reality that lodged itself as a leaning post supporting something that made us feel alive. It was something that made us close to someone else, enabled a meeting of the minds or gave us something of the truth of being human for the sake of others. It was something done for us and helped us repeat for the benefit of someone else. It was something we learned about the heart. The heart as it was touched and caused us to touch in return. It’s right there in the hood of our memory.

At the root of this ‘lost’ experience is its real source. We lost our personal contact with God. Don’t you think it was kind of strange that the man in the ad looked for sunglasses in a cave? The real kicker is that the glasses were there in his hood. Have you been looking for something you lost, looking in the caves of success, wealth, status, appearance, food, clubs, churches, friends, cars, houses, vacations and He has been in your hood, hovering over you, all the time? Have you got a hood with God in it but you just haven’t checked to see if He is there?

It reminds me of Genesis where the devil tempts Adam and Eve to shift their gaze from just being in the immensity of God’s presence and His environment to concentrate on the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Notice it’s not the tree, the garden, the earth, the universe nor the God who made it all. They become fixated by a miniscule urge to focus on a miniscule part of Creation in a miniscule moment thinking they can possess it all by one miniscule taste. They chose to accept the idea of an immediate fix that would give them instant everything like instant wisdom, instant God-likeness, instant control and security. What it did give them was a ‘fast food’ mentality where you can “Have it your way” and the TV ad that promises you can ‘have it all and have it now” couched in the background anthem, “I Did It My Way.”

What they ended up with was a long-term realization that they had lost everything that made life real. They were alone, afraid, separated and torn within, disconnected from their source, their sense of being at one with the One and one with each other. The moment of consciousness, the moment of instant desire for instant satisfaction was a moment trapped in something that brought the awareness of death, time. That moment they made the choice to think and act apart from God the clock started ticking. Time was their enemy. Everything became a matter of time. Death was laying claim to its first victims. But when we look at time as the hood in which God has chosen to reveal Himself through faith, time is redeemed. Check what He says in Ecclesiastes 3,

A Time for Everything
1 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
9 What does the worker gain from his toil? 10 I have seen the burden God has laid on men. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

(continued tomorrow)

[George & Lynda Dan]

I've been looking for more quiet time. I found it. It was in the hood of my jacket. DUH!!! It was there all along! Just takes a little work from me. Can anyone say PRIORITIZE???!!!