Time Change

 Devotion for the Week...

Next weekend the clocks will go back an hour. I've always been mildly entertained by the fact that we collectively agree that what was 2:00 am should revert to being 1:00 once a year, while collectively agreeing to move it forward in the spring. Time feels like a permanent force, marching steadily forward no matter how much we might want it to stop so we can preserve precious moments or avoid those that are painful, but inevitable. No matter how permanent time feels, though, next Sunday morning when I get up I will go through the house, changing the time on all of our clocks so that they match up to the new reality.

Time is really nothing but a human construct. At some point in our history we needed a way to divide the days into smaller increments and so the hour was born. Now it is so ingrained in us that we do almost everything according to what numbers the hands on the clock are pointing at.

God doesn't follow a clock. He's not confined to time at all, so not only are hours irrelevant to Him, so are days, weeks, months and years. Peter wrote, "But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day" (2 Peter 3:8). How we measure time has no meaning to the One who lives in eternity.

We might be waiting for Him to do something and we want it now, or at least at the specific time of our choosing. God, on the other hand, is waiting for His perfect time. In the New Living Translation, which I usually use, Galatians 4:4 says, "But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law." In the King James Version, that same verse is rendered, "But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law." The fulness of the time means 'within the appropriate or destined time.' Who determined the right time, the appropriate or destined time? God, of course. Only He could know when it was the right time to send our Savior, just like only He can know when it's the right time to answer our desperate prayers today.

Background quilt is Formal Garden

It's not easy to wait, I know. It's not fun, either. But God doesn't make us wait out of maliciousness or because He thinks it's fun to watch us be sad or hurt or anxious. He does things on His schedule because only He can know when the fulness of the time has come. His time is always the right time.