PROBING THE DEPTHS OF “NOW”

All of this started with my asking, “What is time?” I am having difficulty with this idea because, just when I think I have the answer, a new door opens with more challenging questions. I have been in the business of opening doors for some forty-one years. It doesn’t look like it will stop anytime soon.

Perhaps a photo might illustrate my confusion. Look at the photo below and think or write down exactly what you see, nothing more. Take five minutes.

This is my first time seeing this picture, but these are my random thoughts.

I don’t recognize even one person in this photo.

They look like they are alive.

This is a snapshot in time, one moment captured forever.

Each person is an individual who lives seventy or eighty years, then is gone.

I don’t know the backstory of any of these people, yet the sum of choices makes them who they are as I see them in this picture.

Each person is unique, and no two lifetimes are the same, yet, they have lived it out one moment at a time, one NOW at a time.

The past is a record of the choices we have made. The future awaits our choices, and we have only the past to learn what is good for us or bad for us.

Everyone in the group can influence the individual’s choice but cannot make that choice for them.

The NOW is what is real. It is where I find a purpose for my time on earth. It is how I assimilate what my purpose in life is. The future does not exist yet, but because of time, I have no choice but to use the time to make choices that make me more and more human.

In each photo of a person above, they are the sum of their choices, good ones to become more human and bad ones, which lead to dissonance about purpose.

Jesus is the truth because only one truth allows me to go in the correct direction. Jesus, in this context, is the way to show me the direction my future should take consistent with my nature. Jesus is the life because, having tried to sanctify the NOWs of my life with knowledge, love, and service, my life will end my temporal time but begin my spiritual time where there is only a NOW.

This NOW is where I investigate the backstories of everyone in the photo above to see how did measure up against the meaning of life, where they went off track, and how they succeeded.

In time, it would take a lifetime to meet with everyone who ever lived and probe how they did. In spiritual time, I have all the time to become one with all who exist.

The God of second chances allows me to rummage through the backstory of my life right now and pick out those times when I did not act my nature (Galatians 5) and ask forgiveness, even if I have confessed those sins before. My quest is to be perfect as God is perfect.

If heaven is a place of perfection, why is everyone there (except Jesus and Mary) a sinner?

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