The Faithnetworker Newsletter
Vol. 3. No. 4, October 20, 2002
http://www.faithnet.org
Staying on Time
Cool Scripture Cite
"With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand
years are like a day" (2 Peter 3:8).
Hot Internet Site
Find that your computer clock is straying from the correct time? Here
are some solutions.
If your operating system is Windows XP, you can have your computer
clock automatically synchronize with internet time servers. Double-click
on the time on your system tray and follow the Internet Time tab to
the synchronization settings. This tab may not be present if your computer
is part of a network that has its own synchronization.
A handy program to install for synchronizing your computer clock is
YACS, available for free from DeRamp Software.
http://farmtek-fti.com/DeRamp/index.htm
Some Timely Thoughts
Mark Sibley Jones
Next Sunday morning at 2 a.m., Daylight Savings Time ends and we "gain" an
extra hour by setting our clocks back. Seems strange that we really get
the extra hour back when the savings ends. It's a timely reminder of
the relative nature of time, isn't it?
To quote James Taylor, "time isn't really real." Profound,
huh? We humans invented time, based on the apparent orderliness of natural
cycles: night and day, lunar months, yearly repetition of seasons. Yet,
at best, it is a force-fit. The earth doesn't complete its orbit around
the sun in 365 days, does it? No, it is more like 365.2422 days to one
orbit (that's roughly 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds).
Even with our leap year adjustment, we are still left with an average
of 11 minutes and 13.9999 seconds of extra time per year.
To further complicate matters, the earth really doesn't make a clean
orbit around the sun. As the sun whizzes through space toward Vega, we
are spinning around the sun as it travels. So, even in exactly one year
from now, we will not return to this point in space. We're heading toward
Vega. And God only knows where Vega is headed, much less where it is
now. The Vega we see up above is really where it was approximately 26
years ago, because it has taken that long for its light to reach earth.
To return from my digression, the question of time goes begging. What
are you going to do with your extra hour this Sunday . . . or, with your
extra 11 minutes this year?
As you pause to ponder the enormity of creation, pause also to create
some time and space in your life for God. Ironic? Yes, and I believe
it is central to the spiritual life to join God in such co-creative action.
As we create time and space for God, God creates new life in us.
We ring a bell at my church during the Sunday morning worship service.
It is a call to prayer. Sometimes the bell ringer is a bit fidgety and
makes the cadence rather fast; other times, it is slower. Same result:
a chiming of the heart to stillness. It is one of the few moments in
my week when I stop. Many of the thought objects spinning in my head
begin to lose their centrifugal force and start dropping from consciousness.
Then, for just a brief instant, I sometimes feel that God comes into
view--the eternal constant so often obscured by the many objects of preoccupation
that crowd my mind's foreground.
What would it mean to give up the illusion of time and just be . . .
be in God? To let go of the tyranny of schedules and alarms, appointments
and dates? To begin to sense that behind all the constructed facade of
time lines there exists a loving purpose that pervades all things, creates
mysterious deja vus, and affirms that we are where we should be even
though our destination was reached via poor decisions?