It's nearly midnight. We mark time at midnight, acknowledging the passing of another year. A milestone. Time passes. We stop once in a while to notice.
Meanwhile, the days are once again getting longer as the earth travels around the sun. Vacation ends for the school kids, and they begin another grading period. Time passes, slowly or quickly, depending on your age and perception. 'Big wheels keep on turnin'..."
Koheleth, in Ecclesiastes, remarks rather jadedly, 'to everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven,' and observes 'it's all chasing after wind.' Vanity. Foolishness. Meaningless. After all, you're born, you die, and what good is it? Perhaps, I've often thought, Ecclesiastes is there for those in the slump of a midlife crisis!
"Time passes. Will you?" declared a sign on my teacher's wall in high school. Yes, I will too. I'm not exempt from the cycles, the vanity, the season to be born, the season to die. Jesus has taught me, though, that there is more than this enslavement to time. His coming means, in part, that the cycle is far from meaningless, indeed, it is hallowed, sacred, deeply a part of a larger thing which remains outside our ken. In Jesus, God who made time became subject to its limits, and somehow filled it full of himself.
I'm part of it, the earth and its marking of time. So I'll make a toast and kiss my husband when the clock strikes twelve. I'll laugh at my exhaustedly silly children, and wonder what the year will hold. But I will also thank God that when the time He created has served its purpose, it too will be swallowed up in the glory of an everlasting life.
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