Advent Day 9

When you picture time, the passage of time, what do you imagine?
I have always seen it as a river, with me bobbing along through different scenes from my life, which are being enacted on the bank.
I can see the things, but I'm inexorably carried past and on to the next thing.  There's no staying, no stopping.
(This is probably weird, but so am I so that's alright ;). )
I was reading in a book today about how it scares some of us, the awareness of time passing. Grey hairs and laugh lines, instead of testifying to the facts of our lives, just serve remind us that our time left is growing smaller, running out. We don't like to picture the end of that river.

My favourite river is the Sakeji.
It's a tributary of the Zambesi, the river that plunges in world-wonder glory from a mouth 2 km wide: Mosi Oa Tunya (aka the Smoke that Thunders aka Victoria Falls) in Zambia.

I almost died there. (Not at Vic Falls - a logical place to have a near-death experience - but in the Sakeji.  I was swept through a dam, whooshed out onto a breakwater, and lived, with just a few scars to tell the tale.)

The Sakeji curls around the school where I lived for a year. It was ingeniously made use of to fill the huge outdoor swimming pool - a channel was dug from the river to the pool at one end, and at the other end of the pool, the water drains back into the river.  On swimming days, the channel is opened and water gushes from the river, tumbling and tearing (in the rainy season) or creeping steadily (in the dry season) into the pool until it is filled.

I attended a Beth Moore video study a few years ago where she spoke about the fullness of time.  She explained that our cultural concept of time is one of time passing - passing us by, always moving, slipping through our fingers.  But the scriptures propose a different concept of time - as if time is filling up, filling in, meeting its purpose in a place.  And as she described it, I couldn't help but picture that huge Sakeji swimming pool, being steadily filled up for its purpose by the river that was already flowing past it.

The fullness of time. Time comes. Time fills.
I love the restfulness of that image. You can lie back and relax in that kind of time. No panic. No rushing. No searing nostalgia. Time isn't passing you by. It's filling you up. Completing you. Meeting its purpose in you.

I love that that's how God describes Jesus' arrival:
When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son.

Waiting for the future can be hard.  Looking back can be hard. When we see time as fleeting, we do both. Oh, waiting and wishing I had done things differently is just agony.

But this spacious, gracious idea of time filling me? Nothing is gone. Nothing is wasted. It's all there. It's filling me up like that great big pool.

I hope, this Christmas, you find yourself filling up with all the fullness of time.
xo.