2.5

Time interrupted

Time’s invisible presence proceeds unnoticed by most of us, a silent force that compels us to accommodate it’s every move. How can this invisible and intangible time get our attention when we are so intent on work, possessions, and the daily parade of activities that so easily distract and absorb us? Why should it be noticed when it proceeds so predictably with no apparent risk of changing? But when time uncovers itself to our heart in ways that only our mind had previously known; when a new awareness rattles our relationship with time and unearths deep gaps in our subconscious trust in it’s benign predictability and we discover it betraying our trust; when our being is confronted with time’s final word of loss over gain, decay over growth, death over life, the end of all beginnings, the expanding universe’s final explosion. . .questions and fears rise and clamor for answers

When time’s predictability is deeply interrupted, we look for ways to cope that are close and can conform us again to time’s familiar ways. It is easier to assimilate changes to a familiar system than to accommodate a new order. But some events interrupt life and its known system so profoundly that the known cannot accommodate the new unknown. How does one respond to the unpredictable? Where are the resources needed to answer the never before experienced? All that is familiar is limited by its known nature that is inadequate for our deepest needs that surprise us. Our most profound needs and desires cannot be satisfied by what our own hand offers from our known self. The answers to our deepest needs can never be found in the known system of this creation because our deepest needs originate from outside, from our Source

These needs and questions do not come from the breakdown of this world’s system. Time under the sun continues as it has always been, incongruous to our deepest needs. We rarely notice It’s insensibility to our more profound needs as long as it is maintaining its firm grip on our attention and apportioning our every day. But when our more surface relation to time is shaken at its core, we are loosed from its closed system and see its limits. Whether our shaking comes from death, illness or some other great loss, it opens up an opportunity beyond time’s limits for God’s altogether different time. When God interrupts our closed system, the secure becomes insecure and the familiar, strange

God invariably brings a kind of dying before renewing a life, as a seed must first break open and die before it can sprout new life. When our security in time’s created realm is shaken or dies, God is making another way for another time, one that is set by His immediate presence. At its extreme, this shaking can nearly undo and unravel our core. But when the place that is deepest inside us is touched with a holy realm that is entirely outside us, God means to loosen and shake us free from created time that had been possessing us, even though it never had any legitimate rights to us

God in His holiness shakes and breaks apart the mutual grip between our self and time. When we find ourselves less able to see and know and understand, when we become lost in the familiar, God is giving in these things His confounding and precious gift. God calls to us in our lost wanderings and inability to know our own life. He shakes and interrupts our life with His touch to break us free so we can freely come to Him
I will lead the blind by a way they do not know, in paths they do not know I will guide them. I will make darkness into light before them and rugged places into plains. These are the things I will do, and I will not leave them undone (Isaiah 42:16; see also 29:18-9; 35:5-6)