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?

May you have a good time in this life!