A Mist that Appears

July 24th this year marked 2 years since Clarke had cancer surgery. It seems like it happened in another lifetime. Mid-August, that same year, granddaughter left to teach in England. She came home for Christmas that same year but then we didn’t see her again until then end of July this year. Our long-time cleaning lady has just returned after 17 months. All of these seem to have happened much longer ago then they actually did.

I was reminded of a programme on Time featuring Stephen Hawking that I saw on the television a few years back. He made the comment that time doesn’t exist except when we use it to mark ages, hours, years or distances, heat or cold, etc. Time is in fact something that we humans have invented to serve our own needs. When nothing new is happening, time slows down for us. Remember those summers when you were a kid that lasted forever? But when new things are happening, time speeds up and you hear people saying things like, ‘I don’t know where the time went. It seems like yesterday the kids were in diapers and now they’re graduating from university.’

The time with COVID has been a desert with nothing new on the horizon and the time has been long for most of us. Hence I think I can be forgiven for think the surgery had been much longer ago than 2 years, our granddaughter had been away forever and my house was about to be condemned it was so long since it had had a good cleaning!

I was reminded of the Israelites wandering for 40 years in the desert,(Haven’t we just done that?), of Methuselah living to be 969 years old (There have been times in the last 17 months that I have felt at least that old) or Sarah laughing at the thought of having a baby at 90 years of age (There were a couple of times that I was close to having hysterics myself).

One place the Bible talks about our concept of Time is in James 4:13-15. “Come now, you who say “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town, and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will do this or that.”

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