I take it for granted that I was born on Monday 21st November 1977.
I take it for granted because I don’t see any reason to interrogate that and consider things any differently. Likewise as I write this blog the time on the bottom right corner of this laptop informs me both of the 24 hour clock reading and the date on which this is being written. I don’t investigate that thoroughly. Yet even a cursory reflection on it raises questions.
Questions like – why do we measure time in seconds, minutes and hours? When was that ever agreed upon? Who agreed on the way that we measure years? Surely not all cultures have bought into this. Other cultures may have different ways of calculating days, weeks, months and years – why do we just accept the way that we have always done it? Why haven’t we considered alternatives even as the current reality itself is the exercising of an alternative.
The religious background I was brought up in had a sceptical attitude to the calendar accepted in the culture. So whenever it came up to certain times of the year, like the end of the year, they would stress how it was the end of the Roman year as though they operated on a different calendar. I wouldn’t have minded that so much, but the other calendar that we operated by wasn’t that evident and pronounced in shaping the alternative way of viewing time and considering how we look at days, weeks, months and years.
Having said that, it did made me chuckle the degree to which investment was made about the new year as though it was definitive and marked something significant, when to all intents and purposes this was a construct we bought into without much thought. It probably helps in some cases explain why New Year’s resolutions start with great excitement and fade out before the end of the first month.
It occurred to me as I turned 40 this year that if anything my year is measured from the point of my birth – and even that can be viewed in various ways – time of conception, time of physical delivery, time of intentionally following Jesus, even the time of my engagement to my wife and the time of our public declaration of union in the wedding. So many points to look back and mark the time and set it as a time for going forward. It’s all about time.
In this rambling exploration, I’m just saying that I don’t get all that hung up with certain timely big occasions where at other times they are monumental to me.
At all times, though, it is good to be thankful at this time. Time is in His hands.
(Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash)
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
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