Another Perspective
Let’s focus on some time conversion here. Psalm 90:4 “for a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night“. I doubt that I’m alone in feeling that the Lord’s “answering” of prayers often seems to be an excruciatingly long wait or at least a delayed process. Although we’ve come to understand that our Lord’s discernment knows what we seek and more importantly what we need, better than we do, the waiting still tries our patience and sometimes our faith. Patience is a constantly diminishing cultural perspective for us. As technology and related expectations grow, our patience wains. Imagine living 5,000 years ago, when you felt the pangs of hunger, you might have had to go hunting or even worse, wait until the next harvest before you could appease that hunger. Today we have fast food or a 30 minute pizza delivery. How about news, historically that only moved as fast as the person who was carrying it. Today an alarm sounds on a smart phone for any world news that we’ve shown a casual interest in. Imagine what this does to our tolerance for patience.
God’s time frames are quite different than ours. He is fast and amazingly responsive. The verse from Psalm 90 above puts some perspective into play for us. It might not have made as much sense 3,000 years ago as it does today, but the Bible’s adaptability is amazing. 100 of our years, isn’t even a full day by God’s time standard, more like two hours. Let’s say that we pray for something each day for a year. At the end of that year we realize the answer to those prayers. By God’s watch, that response time is actually about the same as it takes us to just call in and order a pizza, forget the delivery. God reminds us that He’s consistent, He always keeps His word and that his world is not our world, yet. In fact our world is just a tiny little speck of His world. Proverbs 19:11 reminds us that “A man’s wisdom gives him patience” and when asked (in Job 28:20), “Where then does wisdom come from“? Job 28:23 answers, “God understands the way to it and He alone knows where it dwells…“. Our impatience with time should never abridge or diminish our faith. God’s timelessness, wisdom and patience with us should be the model of tolerance we also embrace and cherish! Our perspective on time is distorted by our short lives, while God’s is perfect from every vantage point.
JC Calkins with COMMON SENSE 4 UNCOMMON PEOPLE
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