Serving Jesus in Our Community

From the Pastor's Pen

A Matter of Time

Of course, when picking an image to go with this, it had to be my time lord, Tom Baker!

I’m writing this on a particular moment in time. It’s Friday morning, Friday 31st January, and it’s 10.20am. Only a few weeks ago it was Christmas, and yet that seems like years ago! Isn’t time strange?

On Wednesday afternoon I met my supervisors to discuss my progress on my thesis. When I started my DMin I had five years to complete it. Five years, that sounded like forever, and yet suddenly I found myself sitting in my tutor’s office working out the timetable of the final few months of my work. At the start of the conversation I had eight months to complete it. By the end I had three or four in order to make sure there is time for a mock interview and time for any corrections to be made. The deadline that at one point seemed far out in a dim and distant future is crashing towards me at violent speed. Every week counts.

Still, time doesn’t always speed up, sometimes it slows down. Wednesday night I was down for the night shift at the Winter Night Shelter. Having dozed through the early hours of the night, I took over at about 4.20am and sat keeping an eye on things until breakfast and the subsequent mad dash to turn the church around for Toddlers. Those two and a half hours in the dark, accompanied only by the sounds of sleeping companions, lit by a dim lamp, extended further than the 150 minutes that made them up should have been. Many words were typed as the world stood still and there was still a bit of time to think and pray and browse a few websites! I got far more done than I ever do during the day. Scientists tell us that time is constant, but our experience of it doesn’t always match that reality. Perhaps there is hope that I might meet that deadline after all.

My favourite TV show is Doctor Who, I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be a Time Lord and have the power to travel forwards and backwards in time at whim. We don’t have that ‘luxury’, so let’s make what we have count. Makes me think about the incarnation. Time must have been quite a shock to Jesus, the one who was Lord of Time and who existed out of time, entering into it and being bound by it as we are, experiencing its passing and its urgency. Our lives are constantly constrained, delineated and timetabled by time. It is part of what it means to be human. The challenge to seize the day is that of making the most of the time we have. As Christians, whether time goes fast or slow, how can we use it to serve our God and our neighbours just as Jesus so supremely did?

Church newsletter article, 02.02.20

Posts labelled ‘From the Pastor’s Pen’ reflect our ministers’ views and not necessarily those of Wormley Free Church/The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion

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