by Niki Turner
The author of Ecclesiastes writes (if you've ever seen "Footloose" this will sound familiar):
There's an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything on the earth:Country music (and a classic cliche) put it this way: "Timing is everything."
A right time for birth and another for death,
A right time to plant and another to reap,
A right time to kill and another to heal,
A right time to destroy and another to construct,
A right time to cry and another to laugh,
A right time to lament and another to cheer,
A right time to make love and another to abstain,
A right time to embrace and another to part,
A right time to search and another to count your losses,
A right time to hold on and another to let go,
A right time to rip out and another to mend,
A right time to shut up and another to speak up,
A right time to love and another to hate,
A right time to wage war and another to make peace.
(Eccl 3:1-8 MSG)
If the timing is off in my car, nothing runs quite the way it's supposed to.
If the timing is off between a couple on Dancing With the Stars, they aren't voted on to the next week of competition
Timing (and missing it) are scary prospects.
What if we "miss" the plan? What if our internal clock is skewed by a slow battery or a sun flare or a prankster in the household? What if we don't "hear" from heaven and respond accordingly in time? Are we then lost to the ultimate power and control of that incessant ticking called TIME?
In my opinion, God is bigger than our mere human understanding of time in the form of years and centuries and millenia. Forgive my comparison, please, but like Doctor Who of BBC fame, God is the ultimate "TIME LORD."
And because His expressed will for us is for our GOOD, not for our failure, defeat, or destruction, He is well able (and perhaps more importantly, willing) to correct our human failures in timing in order that His perfect plan for our well-being is ultimately fulfilled.
The Patrick and I are notorious for getting lost on road trips. On the way home from Las Vegas we missed the only exit we needed to take on the interstate (and that with GPS) and ended up more than an hour off course somewhere in Utah. We were lost because we hadn't been paying attention to the blinking dot on the iPhone that marked our course, but that didn't mean we were forsaken! (Although the dot on the map we found ourselves at might have been sucked right out of a "Deliverance" or "Race With the Devil" movie set.
Too many people get off course, fall out of God's plan for some reason, find themselves on an unexpected detour, or are convinced they are lost forever. Not. True. Can you imagine how crazy insane it would have been if we'd called up the kids and said, "We missed an exit, got lost, and are gonna settle down in this tiny little burg in the boonies of Utah." Um, no. No one does that. (Do they?)
Sure, missed turns and opportunities cost us something, but they aren't the end of the road! Our God is able to redeem the time, able to give us new opportunities. Stop looking backward at what you may have missed and start looking forward!
About the Author: Niki writes fiction, nonfiction, blog posts, newspaper articles, grocery lists, and Facebook status updates. She can be found at her own blog, In Truer Ink, in addition to posting here. She was a 2009 finalist in the Faith, Hope, and Love "Touched by Love" contest.
I'm weird, but this is making me think of all sorts of physics, science kind of stuff. God isn't restricted by time. He lives outside of our constraint of time. Even in our universe, time is relative and not nearly as fixed as we think.
ReplyDeleteYou're not weird, that's what it makes me think of, too. The whole thing in Ezekiel about the "wheel within the wheel" has to do with the time-space continuum. It's very intriguing! And somehow comforting to know God is not limited by our clocks!
ReplyDeleteI loving knowing my mistakes were all in the plan and His timing is definitely beyond our comprehension. We are so limited and yet we think we are so stinkin' smart!
ReplyDeleteloved this reminder Niki. I've had too many days this summer where I let "time" make me a miserable thing.
ugh.
Stress of my own making...
The story of getting lost made be cringe. I'm such a master of losing my way that my hubby has called me geographically dyslexic. My worst experience was trying to go from an unfamiliar mall near Tarrytown, NY to my new apartment in NJ, and ending up on the Long Island Sound.
ReplyDeleteFunny, your post made me think of some past excursions that seemed like they were the wrong direction. And yet, when I go back and see what God has accomplished in my life though those same events...
Interesting. Good post!
Very inspiring, Niki. I'm amazed that we can still get lost when we follow directions. I know for me, it's when I anticipate a direction and go forth on my own into strange territory without checking if it's the right way. Thanks for the reminder.
ReplyDeleteI resemble that comment, Deb. It has been one of those years... Some days I look back and think, "God knew we were going to end up back here, all those years ago..." and I wonder why we had to take the trip!
ReplyDeleteBarb, you and my daughter and my husband share that geographical dyslexia! Good name for it!
ReplyDeleteYou're right, of course, if we looked at our detours we'd see that God almost always finds a way to make good come from them!
You're welcome, Anita.
ReplyDeleteI agree... reining in that urge to try a possible shortcut is hard when we already have direction from heaven. My son told me we were hiking on a game trail (where I found the bear paw print). I asked him how he knew and he said, "It follows the path of least resistance. Animals are smart that way. Only humans always take the hard road." Such wisdom from the young.