Never Enough Time, Sunday, January 3, 2010, A Sermon by Reverend Lillie Mae Henley
When I lived in Hyde Park in Chicago during seminary, I rented a room from a very nice widow Nancy about four blocks from the campus. I would say then she was about seventy; although, I do not know for sure. Once, when I went down to the kitchen for something from the refrigerator, I noticed a note on the refrigerator that I had not seen before.
It was one of her note cards, the kind we might send as a “thank you,” note. On it she wrote, “There is never enough time.”
There is never enough time.
We grow up, live our lives in our twenties and thirties, seeking the path which will take us to our fullest potential, and think little of time.
It is when we are “settled” into the middle of our lives that we begin to think about time.
And we think about time in terms of our accomplishments: how successful are we in relation to our life’s goals. It is in the middle of our lives that we begin to plan for “retirement.”
These are life passages influenced by our culture and our modern times. Around the world more people are concerned with their next cup of grain, than they are their life’s goals and retirement.
I’m not saying this because I think goal-setting and life planning are needless activities compared to acquiring a cup of grain to feed your family. They are the same, really. One deals with the reality of one’s life in whatever way ensures survival. Look at the Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. They board the oil tankers, take the crew and cargo hostage, and bargain with the owners for the release for ransom. They are, simply, thieves and robbers. Yet, what they are doing is the only means they can come up with to ensure their survival.
In the book Infidel, by Somalian Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about the events which led to the de-stablization of Somali thirty plus years ago. The people are starving, not only for food, but for normalcy as well.
In post-modern western countries, we have opportunities for more than survival; we have opportunities for recreation, fun, travel, that many around the world do not have. Nevertheless, in these hard economic times, which we think are “temporary,” more and more of us are living to survive.
Whether it is day to day, cup of grain to cup of grain, or paycheck to paycheck, two months away from losing our homes, we deal with the reality of our lives in whatever way ensures survival.
What does survival have to do with time?
Our lives are a succession of events, a living of life’s passages, with all the trials and tribulations that are part of living. No matter how privileged, how educated, how challenged, how much or how little we have, we all, somehow, live through our life’s events. We live through time.
In the Secret Life of Bees, a young girl is in search of her mother’s memory, and finds herself living with a family of southern women, one of which is a beekeeper. In one part of the story, she is trying to help save a hive of bees and she is stung. She says,
“The sting shot pain all the way to my elbow, causing me to marvel at how much punishment a miniscule creature can inflict. I’m prideful enough to say I didn’t complain. After you get stung, you can’t get unstung no matter how much you whine about it. I dived back into the riptide of saving bees.”
We live though time, no matter how many times we are stung by bees, we live through time, until the end of our lives.
And, it seems, we are all pretty much like my landlady Nancy in Chicago, we feel as though there will never be enough to do all that we want to do.
Another way of looking at time is to see it as it truly is. A reality of the construction of our cosmos and a construct of our human culture.
A reality of the construction of the cosmos and a construct of our human culture.
Genesis 1:14 And God said Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years.
Many of us believe that God existed before the cosmos, outside of the passage of time. We believe the Eternal, the Infinite, is a reality beyond time. Others of us, believe God is a part of the construct of the Cosmos, within the passage of time. However, we believe, we as human beings have the need to know, in our own way, our God. We need to know, because, as a professor once said to me, “We have a God-shaped hole in our hearts.”
Time is also the construct of our human culture. We mark the days. Jesus answered a question about time in John 11:9, “Aren’t there twelve hours in each day? If you walk during the day, you will have light from the sun, and you won’t stumble.”
That is the living through part—living the hours we have as God would have us live them. Stumbling in the dark, walking in the light, getting stung by bees, listening for God’s guidance, knowing that time means not one thing—unless we seek meaning in our lives. There is always more “time” for us—more “time” until our very last breath.