Time

Time is not even. My watch protests this thought and measures each second the same but I know it is lying.

The last hour of a boring work day is identifiably longer than the last hour you have to spend at Disneyland, isn’t it? The last night you have left to write a paper is much shorter than the night before you get to go on a special trip (unless you’re packing at the last minute and then it flies by again...).

I don’t know how it works, but it does.

Your children grow in a flash – so fast you don’t even know what could have happened. Time machine, wrinkle, warp, who knows. And yet, there are moments, tiny moments, that stretch and elongate, like your reflection in a fun-house mirror, and you think they are eternal.

When a hummingbird stops in front of you and looks right at you.

When you look into someone’s eyes and you see beyond color, even expression. You see THEM and you think: this must have been what your mama saw the day you were born.

When you watch your child run and laugh with abandon.

When your newborn baby opens up his eyes, his face, and he looks long and hard at you, studying you.

When your child has his first seizure – the longest 30 seconds yet.

When you stand by the bed and watch a single tear run down your dying grandmother’s cheek. To this day I wonder why she was crying.

Perhaps God, in His wisdom knows how we are, flying about, like bulls in the china shop, and he takes certain moments and turns the clock backward just a bit, just enough so that we stop and notice. He knows that otherwise we would lose the lesson, miss the beauty, forget the heart-stopping wonder that is His world.

These moments are the asterisks of our lives that keep the minutes and days, the hours and decades from running together, the bullet points that help us to make sense of the rest. How on earth can we measure them with a second hand?