Running on God Time
Our potential as a human being in learning, growth and advancement is limited by only one factor: time.
Average lifespan:
fly : 25 – 60 days
pet mice : 1 – 2 years
pet dog : 10 – 12 years
human : 70 years
God on the other hand is the alpha and the omega. He IS at the beginning of time. He IS at the end of time. He IS in fact independent of the dimension of time.
For the sake of argument, let’s make a statement that God’s age is 70,000,000,000,000 trillion years (that’s seventy trillion trillion years to you). Can it be that God has advanced so much in learnings, growth and advancement that we cannot possibly understand the context of his decisions?
Let’s make this less abstract. Can a fly, who only lives to be 60 days be made to understand the secrets of the universe, and the purpose of life? How rudimentary will you have to structure this knowledge in order for the fly to understand, given its limited brain size and life time? Suppose that fly could learned to write and capture thoughts on paper and pass its knowledge to the next generation. Now it gets better. New flies spend 1/3 of their life learning from the previously gained knowledge. And the remaining 2/3 of their life can be spent advancing the fly civilization.
Unfortunately, not all lessons can be transferred.
Knowledge can be transferred through remediation. But wisdom can only be gained from personal experience. We all start as babies, learning human interaction, starting first on basic human needs of warmth, food and water. Then we advance to the insatiable need for love and acceptance. And throughout all this we learn self-control, empathy, sympathy, compassion and more. Along the way, we hopefully become selfless. We learn to think beyond just ourselves, and to extend that sphere to our family and to the greater society. But then we die and our children starts the cycle all over again.
This is why history often repeats itself. We never learn from the past, what cannot be transferred from the past. Knowledge can be transferred. But wisdom cannot. You can write a book about wisdom. But you cannot transfer wisdom before the moment of value crystalizes. The moment of value is the single point in time when a piece of knowledge transforms into a piece of wisdom. For example, try telling a smoker that smoking is bad for him. He will agree with you. He knows it is cancer causing. He understands he will die from it one day. The knowledge is easily understood but it has no value to the smoker. However one day a doctor informs the smoker he has 6 months to live. At that very exact point in time, the moment of value rocks his world. Wisdom emerges from the ashes of knowledge. This very same knowledge – smoking is bad – suddenly take on a different dimension of value, context and impact. It is now wisdom.
I often wonder. Am I doomed to repeat the mistakes of my parents, my grand parents and my ancestors? Is this inevitable? It seems like it. And I suppose my children will have to go through their own process of discovery as well.
Now let’s revisit our relationship with God with this new context of time, knowledge and wisdom. I just finished reading 1 & 2 Kings, and 1 & 2 Chronicles and its the ultimate story of learning and relearning, cycle after cycle, again and again until finally God called for respite and the Israelites were taken captive to Babylon to recover for a new beginning. That is God’s context when He deals with us. He looks at time far longer than we do. He take multi generations into account. He also knows we “forget” easily and we are trapped in our endless cycles of learning and relearning. It is inevitable. It is the nature of our human limitation. We are not masters of time. God is.
Perhaps with this new understanding, we can learn to take peace from God’s “not now”. Not for our forefathers. Not for our children. But for ourselves. For after all, wisdom is what we take with us beyond this life. It is not transferrable. It is not replaceable. It is meant for us. For God intended we discover it, on our own time, in our lifetime.
Colin Wong lives with his wife and three kids in the always sunny, never rainy wonderful land of Seattle.
