REFLECTIONS
February 17, 2008
 
 
And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years,
Genesis 1:14
 
 
Race with Time
 
“Houston, we have a problem.” These familiar words set in motion a race with time for answers to the crisis threatening the safety of Apollo 13. The ground-crew searched feverishly for the answers. The search looked beyond the obvious, beyond the laws of nature, beyond all that seemed possible for solutions that would return the spacecraft safely home. Thanks to out of the box thinking, they found them.
Out of the box thinking looks beyond the obvious, the traditional, and nature’s laws that form the barriers that blind us to possibilities. The barriers to possibility set the dimensions of the boxes we live in. Some can see possibilities that others can’t see, but that only means the boxes are different sizes. It doesn’t mean anyone lives outside them.
We all live in boxes. We only see the limits of possibility differently. For some, the limits fall within the confines of traditional methods and processes. Others are able to visualize beyond tradition only to confront the limits of nature’s laws. But if nature’s laws were unconquerable, then the Wright Brothers’ plane would never have flown.
But there is at least one constraint we share in common. It is time. Time is a daunting dimension in our lives. We can’t stop it or even slow it down. Time is ever present and ever advancing. Time is a dimension that is hard to think beyond.
Time, though, is not daunting to God. He created it. God is eternal. Eternity is endless, and it is also timeless. Now timelessness is a dimension I simply cannot grasp. I am unable to imagine life without seasons to mark the years, without calendars counting the days, without clocks ticking away the seconds of life. I cannot imagine life without its race with time.
When Apollo 13 returned safely home, the ground-crew won their race with time. On that occasion they outran it, but they did not defeat it. There will be another day when time will win the race. Yet on that day of seeming defeat, our victory is to be claimed. We will live in God’s peace that transcends all we can now understand. We will live eternally.
And the race with time will be no more.
 
“You are the light of the world,”
Richard Ì
 

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