It’s Time
It’s a new year, but it’s also just another day. Time is a continuum. Our lives are not neatly divided into discrete segments, be they the years of the calendar, the acts of a drama, or the moments that make up a dull day.
But we like measurable units. We like to take time to weigh our accomplishments and prepare for the next legs of our relay races. We spend the run up to Christmas worrying about whether we’ve earned fabulous prizes or lumps of coal. We spend New Year’s Day working out our resolutions of what we’re going to do differently this year.
It’s all artificial. It’s all in our heads. Sure there are the very real cycles of the seasons and of individual days, but the exact moments we’ve cited as the beginnings and the ends are completely arbitrary and they are even off from what little sense there is to their arbitrariness. We’ve picked the dead of winter to mark the passage of a year, but we missed the solstice by more than a week. We’ve set midnight as the demarcation of a day but the application of time zones means that the actual middle of the night shifts around refusing to become slave to our clocks.
And therein is God’s lesson for us today. Make resolutions whenever you need to, not just because the calendar tells you it’s time. Make your life not one of punctuated equilibrium but one of continual improvement. Be bold enough to make yourself a little better all the time, and if you can’t be bold, at least try to be italics.
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