I am currently using my monthly blog to highlight some older important work. These selected pieces are from my personal past but poignantly each is relevant (I believe) to our global present. And each is a handmade sign toward the future. If you are a regular reader here, you may’ve already recognized that TIME and its sightless flow is a really interesting concept to me. Time is both linear and rhythmic with repeated echoes. Time in this sense, is like light energy which is both particle as well as wave. Time flows and it cannot be encapsulated. It impacts every one of us who live within its circuit whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Time can easily go on without us.
Time is more interesting and emblematic than any single one of us musers who sit in our own period on a timeline can grasp. A most published cosmologist admits “Scientists in every discipline are now far, far removed from the reality they claim to explain.” (1) This writer goes on to detail how we just don’t really understand 95% of what hints to us of existence “out there”.
Such is the ineffability of many big and important things as well as this mysterious entity we live in called time. Any pondering of things not understood ought to humble us? Plato said “For every one, as I think, must see that astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.” (2)
But back to time: it is going somewhere, it leads in one direction: Past/Present/Future. And in its wholeness, time is revelatory of a much grander story: with a beginning, a middle and an end. This whole process is superintended by an Artisan (if you’ll allow an even bigger IDEA) who exists beyond time in eternity. Would you be willing to handle that possibility if even for one of your moments?
What prompts me this month is the pregnant report of one spokesman for this Artisan, the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. I have slipped back into his record to glean what he might say to my own time, my own nation’s experience of decline. Jeremiah lived through the last gasps of a once grand culture in the 6th c. BCE. He is appointed to speak into that history, and he is given hint that this won’t be easy. In the very first chapter of his tome, Jeremiah describes an exploratory dialogue he is graced with. The Artisan and Creator who formed the prophet from his mother’s womb, says this: “What do you see Jeremiah?” Jeremiah looks, identifies an object in front of them and replies. “I see a rod (branch) of an almond tree” The LORD then takes that common thing and makes it a lesson: “You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.”
Huh? ok start with the given basics here: The rod is real. It is tangible, it is alive for a time, like a cut flower; but it is only a rod. It will bud however, for God says He will watch over it to perform it. He said this, not me, not Jeremiah, we are just witnesses to the edge of a very big thing.
Any historically alert Hebrew, hearing Jeremiah, would’ve hearkened back to an earlier rod of Aaron’s, some 8 centuries prior. That rod budded, and then produced whole almonds! That fruit producing rod was kept as a holy symbol of God’s miraculous ability in spite of the people’s rebellion. Jeremiah would not have missed the hope embedded in this given simple verbal sign. From their past into his present and assured by God for a future, Jeremiah had something to fasten onto in his heart: God said He would do it in spite of them. God would watch over every promise He had made through time to accomplish it. His words then are where we best be watching with expectation. Herein is lasting hope. Give Him an honest try. His words aren’t hard to find.
- Believing is Seeing, Michael Guillen, Tyndale Refresh, September 7, 2021, p.97
- The Republic, trans.B Jowett, Project Gutenberg, June 22, 2016, Book VII