by Andrew Cromwell
I like things to be on time, don’t you? When I order something and I am told that it will be delivered to my doorstep in two days, it feels right when the smiling man in the brown truck shows up two days later to hand me my package. When I show up at the doctor’s office for my appointment, it makes my heart happy when they call my name at the appointed time. And when I tell my wife to be ready at 6pm so we can make it to the restaurant “on time”, I do so having set the reservation for 30 minutes later than she realizes so we won’t be late (this is purely hypothetical and I would never do such a thing and she’s never been late in her life).
Having spent some time in other countries, I have learned that not every culture is as obsessed with time as we are in the United States. Undoubtedly, we inherited some of that fixation from the British Empire which was known for the ridiculously accurate train schedules that you could set your watch by. Here if a business person tells you they have you in their appointment book for tomorrow, you expect them to show up tomorrow (and probably confirm with a text and a phone call when they’re on their way so you can be ready too and not waste a minute). But in other places in the world, time is a much less intense thing. People are not so specific about hours and minutes and they don’t anticipate that everything will happen quickly either.
In these more time generous places, if you are invited to visit at a friend’s house in the afternoon, you are welcome to drop by pretty much anytime after two in the afternoon and probably all the way until dark. In our time crunched society, the only person we give that much of a window to is the cable man (because internet and TV are more important than just about anything else to us). For the time generous, being “on time” is a very loose term that welcomes both those who are chronically early and those who are unceasingly late.
If you are anything like me, you have frequently fallen into the trap of starting to believe that just about everything in life should happen “on time.” And when it doesn’t, you get angry, frustrated, and disappointed. The problem with this is that you set yourself up to be ticked off pretty much all of the time. But when you think about it, I think you’ll realize that many of the things that we get angry about because they are late, are not necessarily late at all. It is just that we had decided we wanted things to happen more quickly than they actually did. And when our expectations were not met...we whined, complained, yelled, or whatever we did.
We carry this silly notion of time with us into every aspect of our lives. Parents become obsessed with their toddler’s development, haranguing the doctor as to whether Little Johnny is hitting all the metrics and marks. Shoppers throw fits in the grocery store when the line gets long and nobody gets on the intercom to open a new lane. And God forbid we don’t finish school, get the job, and fall in love when we should.
Truth be told, that really is a lot of it. At the end of the day, when God doesn’t do what we want Him to do “on time”, that’s when we really get mad. Or depressed. Or drunk. We throw our little fit because life didn’t happen the way we thought it should have. God didn’t heal the person we wanted Him to. He didn’t get me the job I wanted. And He won’t get my boss fired, no matter how much I pray about it. You get the idea.
The point is, maybe your and my perspective of what is on time and what is late is not all that great. Maybe it’s time we all take a chill pill and stop trying to control everything around us all the time. Because there really is Somebody that has it under control already (and He doesn’t need us to tell Him what time it is).
In the Bible, in Galatians 4 it says, “in the fulness of time, God sent His Son.” God doesn’t make mistakes and He’s always on time — it’s just not your time and it’s certainly not my time!
I like things to be on time, don’t you? When I order something and I am told that it will be delivered to my doorstep in two days, it feels right when the smiling man in the brown truck shows up two days later to hand me my package. When I show up at the doctor’s office for my appointment, it makes my heart happy when they call my name at the appointed time. And when I tell my wife to be ready at 6pm so we can make it to the restaurant “on time”, I do so having set the reservation for 30 minutes later than she realizes so we won’t be late (this is purely hypothetical and I would never do such a thing and she’s never been late in her life).
Having spent some time in other countries, I have learned that not every culture is as obsessed with time as we are in the United States. Undoubtedly, we inherited some of that fixation from the British Empire which was known for the ridiculously accurate train schedules that you could set your watch by. Here if a business person tells you they have you in their appointment book for tomorrow, you expect them to show up tomorrow (and probably confirm with a text and a phone call when they’re on their way so you can be ready too and not waste a minute). But in other places in the world, time is a much less intense thing. People are not so specific about hours and minutes and they don’t anticipate that everything will happen quickly either.
In these more time generous places, if you are invited to visit at a friend’s house in the afternoon, you are welcome to drop by pretty much anytime after two in the afternoon and probably all the way until dark. In our time crunched society, the only person we give that much of a window to is the cable man (because internet and TV are more important than just about anything else to us). For the time generous, being “on time” is a very loose term that welcomes both those who are chronically early and those who are unceasingly late.
If you are anything like me, you have frequently fallen into the trap of starting to believe that just about everything in life should happen “on time.” And when it doesn’t, you get angry, frustrated, and disappointed. The problem with this is that you set yourself up to be ticked off pretty much all of the time. But when you think about it, I think you’ll realize that many of the things that we get angry about because they are late, are not necessarily late at all. It is just that we had decided we wanted things to happen more quickly than they actually did. And when our expectations were not met...we whined, complained, yelled, or whatever we did.
We carry this silly notion of time with us into every aspect of our lives. Parents become obsessed with their toddler’s development, haranguing the doctor as to whether Little Johnny is hitting all the metrics and marks. Shoppers throw fits in the grocery store when the line gets long and nobody gets on the intercom to open a new lane. And God forbid we don’t finish school, get the job, and fall in love when we should.
Truth be told, that really is a lot of it. At the end of the day, when God doesn’t do what we want Him to do “on time”, that’s when we really get mad. Or depressed. Or drunk. We throw our little fit because life didn’t happen the way we thought it should have. God didn’t heal the person we wanted Him to. He didn’t get me the job I wanted. And He won’t get my boss fired, no matter how much I pray about it. You get the idea.
The point is, maybe your and my perspective of what is on time and what is late is not all that great. Maybe it’s time we all take a chill pill and stop trying to control everything around us all the time. Because there really is Somebody that has it under control already (and He doesn’t need us to tell Him what time it is).
In the Bible, in Galatians 4 it says, “in the fulness of time, God sent His Son.” God doesn’t make mistakes and He’s always on time — it’s just not your time and it’s certainly not my time!
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