Happy Revolution Day

After a little consultation with a friend, I decided this doesn't really sound all that negative (and I think it's pretty good :), so I'll post it.  Happy New Year!

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Date: December 31, 2011
Listening to: fireworks, absurdly bassy music, and the other noises around my apartment.

Tonight will be one of the toughest nights of my time in Costa Rica, I think.  I’ve never been that big of a New Year’s person, but I’ve never spent one without family and friends.  A year ago, I spent what will probably be the best one of my life staring into the eyes of this girl I barely knew who, God knows how or why, had agreed to fly to Nebraska and come to a wedding on under two weeks’ notice.  It was all so strange - how do you introduce a girl you aren’t dating to your family under those circumstances?  Needless to say, she fit right in no matter which house, church, bar, or reception hall I threw her into.  She was unflappable and seemed like she was actually enjoying herself.  I guess the rest is history.

I was listening to a recent “Stuff You Should Know” podcast on daylight saving time (no, there’s no “s”) when something perked up my ears.  Apparently, some of the major opponents to this shift were farmers who appealed that “God’s Time” shouldn’t be meddled with.  At first, that seemed to make sense to me, but then I started to think about it.  Time, at least as far as the daylight saving variety is concerned, was not invented by God but was certainly based on creation.  The rhythms of life are based on the sun, the seasons, and the obsessive human need to organize.  I suppose that makes sense; Genesis seems to indicate that we were made in the image of a being who organized the creation of everything into seven distinct days.

The difference I see between God’s time and Man’s time is not repetition, but rigidity.  I’m not going to go into long-day creation or anything like that here because I don’t need to.  What “clocks” does God (or nature, if you like) provide humanity?  I see two: rotation and revolution.  The day and the year seem quite regular to the observant human being.  The same goes for the phases of the moon and the tide of the oceans.  Throughout the history of the world these markers seem to have dictated almost every important activity within our control.  Every morning, the sun comes up, and every night it disappears again.  It gives our world order, the fourth human necessity, and makes a scary world feel slightly more predictable.  Yet even this obvious and consistent measure of time is flexible.  How terrified must our ancestors have been to notice the days were contracting and expanding before they realized the cycle would repeat itself?  “This will never do,” they said.  “We need something more regular.”

You see, we’ve never been all that good at accepting change or disorder, especially when it lies outside the control of our species or ourselves.  God knows that, which means he knew it before time came to be.  Why, then, did he tilt the earth’s axis and confound our internal clocks?  Why did he make planets that spin backwards?  Why can water be supercooled or superheated, and why on earth does the platypus lay eggs?  I believe the answer isn’t all that hard; I think he wants us to remember who we are.  We didn’t make the earth, the sun it spins around, the force which holds the two together, or the tilt we see as a flaw in the system, and therefore we don’t get to make the rules.  We are not the masters of this universe, and even as amazing as Apple makes our ingenuity look, we never will be.  Those things are the way they are to remind us of two things: one, that all our creative, observational, communicative, and other capacities are imperfect, and second, that they come from a perfect source.

So as this year, an imperfect measurement of a once perfect world, passes into its successor, take a moment to reflect on your place in its story.  Think of your years in the context of natural history.  Feel small.  Relieve yourself of the perception that you are in some way more significant than your neighbor, and then consider a simple fact: despite your smallness, your weakness, your faults, and your pains, the being and force behind the creation of everything - everything - loved you enough to come into a dusty world and die an excruciating death at the demands of people just like you out of the extreme desire to offer each of us salvation.  Christ isn’t just the reason for the Christmas season; he’s the reason for every season.  After all, they were his idea.