Time

Photo: Pocket watch of an Ozark greenhouse owner

Nature’s way of measuring the passage of existence is cycles. Everything has a cycle. There is the cycle of seasons with their indistinct starting and ending points. There is the cycle of a day which is a bit more defined. In a more abstract way the cycle of life is always continuing. Animals reproduce and die in a cycle that continues until interrupted by humans.

So what is time? Long before Copernicus the human mind had taken the earth’s cycles and divided them into segments that the present would march through; thus the creation of time. So now our centuries are broken into decades. Our decades are broken into years, which are broken into months, weeks, days, hours, and minuets. As if that isn’t enough we slice our minuets even thinner into seconds, and beyond. This is all fine and grand for the synchronization of society, but what about understanding eternity? Before time was created, existence happened in the midst of eternity. It still does, we just don’t see it that way. We come to passages about God’s eternal existence as the uncreated creator, or the infiniteness of our presence in Heaven and it blows our mind. What if time had never been created? What if time had been invented from a different planet? Our year might be a different length! But ultimately, none of this really matters. Cycles or days, it goes by the same.