Excuse me. Do you have the time?

[Warning! Warning! Semi-religious, non-denominational post ahead... --RWP]

Clocks are everywhere. The ten-dollar word is ubiquitous. Clocks are in coffee makers, microwave ovens, bedside radios, kitchen stoves, telephones, computers. Clocks are on top of buildings. You name it, it probably has a clock. I wear a small one on my wrist. A much larger one that chimes every fifteen minutes and also shows me the phases of the moon stands in my living room.

Humans have a deep-seated need, evidently, to keep track of time. But we can’t, really, because we are inside it. We can only measure the part of time we personally experience. Human beings measure time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years, decades, centuries, millenia, and eons. A very long time we call “ages and ages.” Computers go in the other direction: milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, femtoseconds (a femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second), dividing time into ever smaller and smaller pieces.

Time has been passing for a very long while. It was passing before we got here and it will probably continue to pass long after we are gone. No one knows for sure. But individually you and I are a small part of something much bigger than ourselves.

God knows how to keep track of time. He invented it and He is outside it. Before time began, there was a timeless eternity, and long after time ends there will be a timeless eternity. There is a timeless eternity going on right now.

It’s always now with God. He does not experience a past or a future. We -- His creatures -- are the only ones who do that. God experiences time in the same way He experiences place, all at once, simultaneously. There is no here or there with God. There is only everywhere. There is no yesterday or tomorrow with God. There is only everynow, everywhen. Theologians (and fools like me) use words like foreknowledge and predestined to try to describe what they (I) mean but those words are simply inadequate. God knows what will happen in the future (whether He causes it or allows it or merely witnesses it is subject to debate) because He has been there already.

Human beings are finite. We have a beginning and we seem to have an end. God, on the other hand, is infinite, without beginning or end. He always has been. He always will be. He doesn’t move at the speed of light. It’s too slow. He moves at the speed of thought. That’s even faster than a femtosecond.

I can fathom a Being without end. It is more difficult to try to fathom a Being without beginning.

Three years ago I wrote a post about C.S. Lewis’s famous mystical limpet. You ought to read it sometime.

But only if you have the time.