Time

Somebody said to me shortly after I arrived back in Africa, "Americans have watches...Kenyans have time."  The concept of time seems to chase after me these days, but especially today.  Today was just one of those days, you know?  One of those days when it seemed everything was out of sorts and you just felt like having a good ol' fashioned pity party.  One of those days when somebody can just so much as look at you sideways and you want to cry. (Okay, maybe the vast majority of you do not have such days, but I do!) My return flight on September 16 seems so far away, but it's hard to believe that I've already been here a month.  How is that possible?  How is it that the past month has flown by but looking ahead to another month makes me want to burst into tears sometimes because it just seems like an eternity? How does this dichotomy exist? Indeed, it seems I keep too close an eye on my watch instead of simply embracing time for what it is.

I sure wish I knew the answers to my own questions because I wrestle every day with this balance of being fully here in Kenya, something I don't normally struggle with, and wanting very much to be back home in Columbus.  I don't want to wish my time away here.  I've done that in the past and walked away with deep regrets.  I don't want to repeat those mistakes, but some days it's hard.  It's hard to not think of all the things I'm missing at home.  It's hard to not think of my family, to not think of Lifepoint, to not think of friends.   

But maybe Sheldon Vanauken and C.S. Lewis phrase it best and ultimately offer perspective I need most in this moment.  In Vanauken's book A Severe Mercy (personal all-time favorite book), the two dialogue about this concept of time:

If, indeed, we all have a kind of appetite for eternity, we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in a society that frustrates our longing at every turn.  Half our inventions are advertised to save time - the washing machine, the fast car, the jet flight - but for what?  Never were people more harried by time: by watches, by buzzers, by time clocks, by precise schedules, by the beginning of the program.  There is, in fact, some truth in the 'good old days': no other civilization of the past was ever so harried by time.

And yet, why not?  Time is our natural environment.  We live in time as we live in the air we breathe.  And we love the air - who has not taken deep breaths of pure, fresh country air, just for the pleasure of it?  How strange that we cannot love time.  It spoils our loveliest moments.  Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it.  We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled.  Time is their natural environment.  Why do we sense that it is not ours?

C.S. Lewis, in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?' Then, if we can complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures.  It suggests that we were created for eternity.  Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it.  We are always amazed by it - how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone.  Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it.  If that is so, it may appear as proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home."

Maybe that's the truth for this moment.  That in my frustrations with time and feeling that the coming month is just a gaping void before me, what my heart is ultimately saying is that I was not made for this earth.  If we understand time through the lens of Scripture, then it's only logical that I should feel this way.  Because we are not meant for this world, for this fraction of time that we think lasts for so long, when it really is just a vapor.

"Each one of these people of faith died not yet having in hand what was promised, but still believing. How did they do it? They saw it way off in the distance, waved their greeting, and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home. If they were homesick for the old country, they could have gone back any time they wanted. But they were after a far better country than that—heaven country." - Hebrews 11:13-16 (MSG)

May we all practice the art of waving our greeting to this world, accepting that we are transients, always longing for another time and another place.