Time

Jesus said to his disciples: "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. You heard me tell you, 'I am going away and I will come back to you.' If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father; for the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it happens, so that when it happens you may believe. I will no longer speak much with you, for the ruler of the world is coming. He has no power over me, but the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me." (John 14:27-31) 

When our hearts are not troubled or afraid, we have peace.  Most of us don’t have that peace because we are troubled and afraid, more often than not.  For example, fear can grip us when we consider our death that eventually will come.  

Scholar and writer William Barclay made this point: “If we really grasped the truth of the Christian faith, we would always be glad when those whom we love go to be with God…We would never grudge them their rest but would remember that they had entered not into death, but into blessedness.” That is our hope, but admittedly there are few of us who don’t fear eternity, even with God.  With death time stops for us, but we enter another dimension we only will appreciate when we arrive.

Time stops?  What does that mean?  Here’s a difficult-to-understand, head-scratching explanation. (begin) If you look at the equations which are at the core of Einstein's theories of relativity, you find that as you approach the speed of light, your spatial dimension in the forward direction shrinks down to nothing and your clock slows to a stop. A reference frame with zero width and with no progression in time is really a reference frame that does not exist. Therefore, this tells us that nothing can ever go faster than the speed of light, for the simple reason that space and time do not actually exist beyond this point. Because the concept of "speed" requires measuring a certain amount of distance traveled in space during a certain period of time, the concept of speed does not even physically exist beyond the speed of light. In fact, the phrase "faster than light" is physically meaningless. It's like saying "darker than black."…  

…Time slows to a stop as one approaches the speed of light (186,000 miles per second!).  If we were able to travel at the speed of light, all of our motion would be wrapped up in getting us to travel at the maximum speed through space, and there would be none left to help us travel through time — and, for us, time would stop. At the speed of light, there is no passage of time. (end)  

This is too difficult around which to wrap our minds.  The concept of time – and the reality of death for that matter – continues to elude me even after consulting the works of astronomer Carl Sagan who had a lot to say about space and time.  Let's face it.  Only God knows.  Time will no longer have power over us.

I’m a long-time admirer of Carl Sagan who prophetically once said: "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

He also remarked: "In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know, that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again [...] I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."

I don’t think much as changed.  Dr. Sagan died about 30 years ago in December 1996.  He rests in peace. Time sure does fly.

Deacon David Pierce