Guest Blog: Just Another Hour. . .

The question of “time,” and the pain we feel at our futile attempts to slow its rapid passage, always reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ observation that our discomfort in the temporal is proof of our reality as eternal beings. He wrote in a letter to Sheldon Vanauken in 1950:

Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (“How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!”) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something about us that is not temporal.

With that as introduction, here is a guest blog from the Chairman of the Board that expresses the problem of time just beautifully.

If I could take the hours

That once I spent with you

And mint them into coins of gold

What would I buy

That equaled their full worth?

Ah, love, another hour with thee.

– Ailene Gilbert Crouse

Lovers measure time by the hours they are apart. When they are together . . . they do not know time.

Mothers and fathers measure time by the brief moments of relief while the baby sleeps, by the treasured fleeting days of a child’s innocence, by the cycle of outgrown shoes, of the school year.

Ailene’s Great-Grandson, and her husband’s namesake. . .

Grandmothers and grandfathers measure time-present by the intervals remembered of time-past. From birth to graduation to marriage, all now yesterday, passed in a moment . . . but, if God be pleased, again from birth to graduation . . .

Humanity measures time by the cycle from Spring to blossoming Spring . . . and from the progress of the grass and trees reclaiming yesterday’s shrieking battlefields and silent cemeteries.

And what of the God of the “eternal now?” The Word compared Him to a father waiting longingly, hopefully, relentlessly, for his wayward son to come to his senses . . . and home to the father’s love.

And now abides faith, hope, and love, which do not know time . . . but the greatest of these is love.