God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone
who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. – John 3:16 CEB
So much love packed into one little verse. No surprise that this is the verse so many
people know by heart. Unfortunately,
that can make it so that it no longer speaks to our hearts.
It’s all about love.
The thing about love is that we experience it best when we’re
fully engaged in the moment. The feeling of awe and wonder that comes with deep
love requires that we bring our full selves to the experience. When we do, we have abundant life in that
moment, and in all the moments in which we are fully present.
That’s eternal life…life which is not concerned with the past or
the future, but is living moment by moment, knowing God’s love and God’s
presence with us in each moment.
The Greek word in this verse that we translate “eternal” is aiṓnios. The word study in the Discovery Bible says that
it means to “not focus on the future per se, but rather on the quality of the age it relates to. Thus believers live in "eternal life" right now, experiencing this quality of God's life now as a present possession.”[1]
Right now, in this very moment, God’s
love is surrounding us and being poured into our hearts.
Being in the moment is lovely when
beautiful things are happening. It’s not
so good when the moment is sad or lonely or painful. Those dark moments suck. (I tried to think of
a better word, but this one works so well.)
Both the beautiful and ugly moments have an eternal quality as they seem
to be timeless and go on forever. When they’re beautiful, we want them
to be eternal. When they’re ugly we very
much don’t.
Does counting the moments
help? Sometimes. But I think counting
time also gets in our way. Time is somewhat of an illusion….a construct.
That same word study says, "Eternal life operates
simultaneously outside of time, inside of time, and beyond time – i.e. what gives
time its everlasting meaning for the believer through faith, yet is also
time-independent.”[2] The funny thing is that we can't even describe the experience without using words that relate to time.
It’s pretty amazing how much time
and effort is put into keeping us all on the same time. The National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) in Colorado uses a 21-clock “ensemble … to generate the
official time.” Three of the clocks tick using hydrogen atoms which are excited
using radiofrequency energy and then sent into a chamber. Once inside, they
decay, emitting a specific frequency of light, sort of like “striking an atomic
tuning fork…The excited hydrogen emits a tone of light. The rest of the clock is
an instrument that tries to sample – tries to listen – to a little bit of that
light and count the cycles of oscillation in that light."[3]
"A
lot of us grow up being fed this idea of time as absolute," says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist at the University of New
Hampshire. But Prescod-Weinstein says the time we're experiencing is a social
construct. Real time is actually something quite different. In some of the
odder corners of the Universe, space and time can stretch and slow – and
sometimes even break down completely.
I stopped wearing a watch years
ago. It was quite freeing. But now I have a cell phone and am dependent on its time-keeping
abilities more than I ever was on my watch.
I use my phone as a timer and a stopwatch. It’s my waking up alarm. It
keeps track of how long I sleep, and how long I exercise.
I wonder, though, whether time isn’t,
in a sense, the enemy of love and of that sort of eternal life in the her and
now for which God gave us Jesus.
I hope we all have moments in which
we step outside of time and into the eternal wonder of the moment. In that timelessness, may we all know anew
how much God loves us all.
Thanks, God.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Geoff Brumfiel, “Researchers say time is an illusion. So why are we all
obsessed with it?” NPR, December 16,
2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/16/1139780043/what-is-time-physics-atomic-clocks-society?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=count%20the%20time&utm_campaign=ni_newsletter&fbclid=IwAR1krTVg4qm4uIDQPAreK1SFVzjqlmFtfB16Ssgj5u13-TAApMM3FhRa64E
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