Time

I attended Della Matthews' memorial service today. It was a beautiful and moving tribute and I was privileged, as Lamont's friend, to be there.

As the service unfolded, I began thinking about our human concept of time. We have a space in which we live, bounded by what we call "birth" and "death." To us, what are those temporal spaces before our birth and after our death?

It seems to me that our spiritual selves must exist outside time except for this brief flicker that we call "life." When we die, we believe we return to that "place" (there's another very human term) from which we came. Likewise, it seems likely to me that when we are born, we step into "time," and when we die, we step back out of it.

When asked His name, God told Noah, "I am." Simple as that. Does being require a time frame, or can a spirit just "be" without being temporal? The times when I am most at peace are those times when I can "let it be" (whatever "it" is).

Maybe, like Bill Clinton, I'm headed for trying to define what "is" is. But as Presbyterians, I think we believe that God and Jesus existed since the "beginning of time." If time is just our own invention, that wouldn't be too hard now, would it?