I was reading Peter Kreeft a while back, and he observed that time is the stuff of which life is made: time is life. People usually say that time is money, but that’s an understatement. Kreeft is right: time is life.
That isn’t meant to suggest that time is a metaphysical necessity, or that there can be no such thing as eternal life. Rather, it means that the life we each possess and now live – our life – is ultimately a very precise allotment of time, and that each sunrise brings us one day closer to death. Time is really all we have, and the whole content of our lives is an answer to the question: What did you do with your time?
Life is a timed test, and you don’t know how long the timer runs.
Like any test, it’s not enough to answer the questions; you have to somehow come up with the right answers. The right use of time is not just about avoiding procrastination, as important as that is. It’s about prudence, in all its aspects. I couldn’t tell you how many times I have found myself, in life, paddling furiously downstream to nowhere (sometimes quite effectively), just to realize that I’d only distanced myself all the more from the source I sought – and still seek. Time, in a sense, down the drain.
From my youth, I’ve been particularly intrigued by the notions of time, of hope, and of reality. These three ideas have dominated my mental life in many respects. Perhaps I will find the opportunity to explore the relationships between them within these pages before too long, but reading Kreeft’s observation jolted me to the realization that the hope which lives in me – for all the lip service I may give it – has been subject to a rather systematic marginalization for much of my life, in deference to a kind of practical expediency – and even a heart attack at 46 didn’t manage to seriously shake it free.
Hope is utterly essential to sanity for anyone who seeks the truth, anyone with a hunger to embrace reality, because reality has two very distinct faces. Reality is God, which we consider Beatitude. But reality is also the mess we live in – as well as God’s judgment on that mess. Hope is the reaching up from brokenness to promise, which climbs the ladder of reality, if you will. And it is hope that allows us to break free from captivity to anxiety and fear, to embrace – and realize – the promise of beatitude in our life.
The great Christian hope is in the return of Jesus Christ to earth: both to judge it, and to fully manifest the new creation. That return may happen today, or it may happen some day long from now – but we are not truly Christian if we do not expect that day, and “wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” And yet, as for each of us, we live our own allotment of time – and we know not exactly what time is ours to live. But our time, too, may come today, and there’s no good reason we should be any less joyfully expectant of the advent of our own end time.
I haven’t met a lot of people that embrace such a joyful readiness for death. In truth, most of us just don’t feel ready for it, and – speaking for myself – I know that’s because I have not lived my life – that is, I have not spent my time – prudently enough. And it seems to me that there is only one right time to start changing that: Today.
I was beginning yet another long commute home in a miserable winter rain storm one night late in 2007, when the thought came to me that I needed to finally make a decision on exactly what to do about a rather complicated computer-related situation I had waiting for me at home – which included choosing a domain name for a web site I was planning. My initial reaction was to procrastinate and say "Maybe tomorrow," but – with Peter Kreeft’s wisdom in the back of my mind – I immediately thought better of that, and said: "No, maybe today!"
There’s really no better time to get on with life – reaching for that promise – and it’s entirely possible that there will be no other time at all. Maranatha!
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