Ecclesiastes 3:11 "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end." "He has made everything beautiful in its time." Everything is beautiful. That means us too. But if everything (and everyone) is beautiful, why do so many feel anything but. I suspect in some way, each of us feels ugly, incomplete, abandoned, rejected or damaged somehow or in some way. I'm not talking about the tragedy of things done to us by others. That's someone violently ripping away the heart of beauty. I know that Jesus is somewhere at work in all that, but I would not want to anyway marginalize the hurt or seriousness of it. Nor can I claim to know how that feels. I've been fortunate to escape that kind of tragedy. But I am talking about that ever present, below-grade feeling of insecurity, incompleteness and inadequacy that eats at everyone one of us...well me anyway. We feel small, sometimes. Sometimes I feel really small.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says "He has made everything beautiful..." but beautiful "in it's time". God has bound us to time. We feel it passing. We are the living picture of its passage. Our skin whithers and wrinkles. Our sight and hearing deteriorates. Our bones and joints ache and slow. You can see time played out on my face over the years. And through that, maybe, we discover the point of time. Maybe time exists so that we can 'feel' it passing away. If there wasn't a shot-clock, the passing of days wouldn't matter.
Yet they do matter because God "also set eternity in the human heart". To us, eternity means forever; time never-ending. But to the Ancient Hebrew, words used to describe time, were also used to describe distance and direction. The meaning of 'eternity' here is far in the distance, beyond the horizon. Because its beyond the horizon, we cannot fathom the fullness of eternity; what God has done/is doing from beginning to end. But God has implanted direction, a divine purpose, on our hearts. And it gets played out over time.
And though we have this divinely planted sense of purpose, we know from Ecclesiastes that nothing on this earth can ever satisfy. I wonder then if that's where some of that 'smallness' comes from. We're hard-wired with an 'eternal' purpose; a reason to be, a place to go. Yet we exist in a world that can't get us there. We ourselves are totally incapable of fulfilling that purpose. And time and time again, we are left deflated and defeated 'chasing after the wind'. We're left small feeling the tragedy of a purpose stalled or stilted.
In Tolkein's 'Lord of the Rings', Gandalf says to Frodo "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." Time's passing matters because we have a distance to be covered, a direction to be fixed on, and a time for it all. Yes, God has bound us to time, BUT He has given us the capacity to live above it. He has made us 'bigger on the inside'. We're anything but small! Beauty is constantly on work in us and the fullness of it gets realized over time, in His time. Fantastic! What then should we do with the time that is given to us? Well, shouldn't the answer to that be to fulfill the divine purpose that has been implanted on our hearts by our creator, by our Father? The horizon may be well beyond this sun, but Daddy made me a TARDIS and I have a new world to see. Allons-y!
