Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years—these are necessary human constructs that help us navigate our world. But they do not control or cause or even determine anything. They only measure our experience.
As a wise philosopher once put it,
“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… timey wimey… stuff.”
Doctor Who
That said, we can expect certain things to happen “on time,” as it were. The sunrise and sunset. Birthdays. The weekend. High school graduation. Album release dates. And such is the purpose of time—to help us measure what has already happened, and then help us measure our expectations for the same or similar events in the future.
But when it comes to spiritual things, we must manage our expectations differently. Because time has to do with material things. Spiritual things do not work in linear time. God himself is not bound by time—because he created time, and is therefore beyond time—therefore all other spiritual things are also outside of time. So when Jesus says something like, for example, “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad”—a nonsensical, out-of-time sort of statement—we just have to accept that he’s talking about a non-linear reality.
Just because it doesn’t make linear sense, doesn’t mean that it’s untrue.
As material-spiritual creatures ourselves, we ought to not be surprised that much of our own experience will reflect this as well. We live partly in time and partly outside of time. Which requires sensitivity to spiritual things, and patience when they do not line up with our clocks or calendars.
