ON TIME by JOHN MILTON
Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace;
And glut thy self with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more than what is false and vain,
And meerly mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain.
For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb’d,
And last of all, thy greedy self consum’d,
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood,
When every thing that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine,
With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine
About the supreme Throne
Of him, t’ whose happy-making sight alone,
When once our heav’nly-guided soul shall clime,
Then all this Earthy grosnes quit,
Attir’d with Stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.
When Jesus had spoken these words, He lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify You, since You have given Him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. I glorified You on earth, having accomplished the work that You gave Me to do. And now, Father, glorify Me in Your Own presence with the glory that I had with You before the world existed. “I have manifested Your name to the people whom You gave Me out of the world. Yours they were, and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word. Now they know that everything that You have given Me is from You. For I have given them the words that You gave Me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from You; and they have believed that You sent Me. I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom You have given Me, for they are Yours. All Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them.
~ Jesus, King of The Universe, talking to His Dad, in John 17
Oh beloved, it is true. The world we inhabit is failing. The death rattles of its consumption are heaving against the frame of our failing political, social, and physical infrastructure. Oh, it is not that the creation could not work, but it subjection to corruption and our willingness to continue that process are making things very bad in the West.
And the West is disgorging its putrid bile and vomit onto the rest of the world. It has gotten to the point that we are very much like Sodom and Gomorrah. We race after the things that are evil in the cosmos, and to suppress our shame, we suppress anyone who would dare speak up against our depravity.
The problem of sin has been handled, and our redemption does draw nigh, though. And this may be why we see the whiny immatureness of evil doing its thing.
Radical religion wants to crush anything in its way.
Radical selfism wants to do whatever self wants.
Radical political systems want to dominate the planet.
Radical capitalists want to rape the worker.
Radical communists want to rape the one who might give them work.
Radical industrialist want to exploit the planet
Radical environmentalists want to control anyone who might use its resources
Radical sexualism has defiled the meaning of sex itself
And anyone who complies to a norm is the one seen as evil.
There is an answer, that is more than satisfying if we can back up the perspective a little bit, and set the focus on infinite. Everything that is wrong in this world is wrong because it is looking at the wrong this to fix the problem. We are looking at everyone else, and really all we are doing is seeing ourselves. And this sets us to a panic, because we totally get it that there is nothing within us to fix the issues.
However, there is One who has already fixed the problems if we will but change our minds and honestly believe. The problem, though, is that in truly believing, we must truly give up any control in our lives and in the lives of others – and this scares us. The tiny little bits of power we think we have gathered to ourselves will be lost if we really give in.
Can we see it? Because, when we give in, the entire context of our existence shifts from a scant 70 years or so, all the way into an infinitely eternal way of living. And nothing (read: no thing) we try to bring with us has any hope whatsoever of being useful in this milieu. However, this same moment of clarity should become an eternal moment of hope. We always knew that nothing we had was going to make any difference. Now, we have found the only One who can.
So, is all of the fallenness of the world feeling like it has fallen on your shoulders beloved? Let it fall to the ground around your feet. None of this stuff can stick for more than a few centuries. And in comparison to eternity, it is nothing.
You (and this fool of a writer) can make a difference though, even in this tiny bit of life we have here. For now, eternity is reaching through us into time. We can make great strides in the Kingdom as we live in the eternal now of His Presence. Tonight is your night beloved. Time to know what kind of time you are living in now.
