And Time Shall Be No More

Recently I found a clock that I thought would fit in well in my family room. It is rather antique looking to match all my other antiques. Mind you, they are my antiques, you know, the kind that I've had for a long time and have not replaced, not antiques in the valuable sense. Actually, the walls in this room are laden with old pictures. Pictures of ancestors of both Ken and me; pictures of children (eight of them), pictures of grandchildren, (seventeen of them). There are pictures from vacations when I was a child and when our children were small. I have a friend whom I don't see very often but think of each time I hang another picture. She is a very good decorator but she "hates" hanging pictures of people. What a difference in our outlooks. To me, the only thing really valuable in our physical world is people; so therefore, people hang about the walls of my home and particularly my family room. There is my great grandfather on my mother's side, my grandparents on both sides, Ken's biological mother whom we never met, my baby pictures, Ken's baby pictures and on and on it goes. There is history in this room. History recalls the passing of time. The "new" (garage sale) clock on my wall ticks away loudly. I rather like its sound but it does make the passing of time very obvious. Four minutes have passed since I sat down at this thing called a computer. Each of the ticks I hear is a tick that I will experience never again. The passing of that tick is troublesome in a way. I can never recover that particular tick. Can you imagine living in a place where time doesn't exist? Where time doesn't change anything? You would never be late for work or for a meeting. You would not have to keep a calendar. There would never be another birthday to remind you that you are getting older. Winter would never come. Children of God will live in a place like that one day. There is a song we used to sing in church which has lost its popular relevance that goes like this......

When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound,
and time shall be no more,
And the morning breaks, eternal, bright, and fair;
When the saved of earth shall gather over on the other shore,
And the roll is called up yonderI'll be there.

As I look at those words I am captured by the opposites in the second and third lines. The second line says "time shall be no more" and in the very next line the author uses a "time" word when he says " the morning breaks". Can there be morning in heaven if there is no time? Isn't morning part of the progression of time? It is all very interesting to think about. The passing of time kind of gets my goat. It seems I'm always in a race with the clock. Each day passes and night comes and I certainly have not accomplished all I wished I could have. Sometime my race will be over and I will live in eternity. Eternity, think about that word. That word itself literally means never ending. The passing of time remind us that there is an end. An end of whatever it is including us. Eternity means that passing is over. It is pure rest. I like the sound of it, don't you?