Take a few minutes to watch the video:
Time is a very fluid concept. Many people buy watches for the sheer enjoyment of having something that constantly changes form in one way or another. As a middle school and junior high kid, one of my many material obsessions was watches. There was something about a time piece that I just had to have. Granted, I wanted it to be shiny, big enough to fit my beast of a wrist, and have plenty of “big red buttons” to keep me entertained for hours on end. Although time is such a fluid motion of change, there are aspects of time that are solid and principle. For example, time always goes in one direction…forward. It is impossible, at least by our power to turn back time. And time always moves at the same rate.
Boy was that ever a boring introduction…I almost put myself to sleep writing that; but it was really the only way to put it simply into words. I’m still trying to figure out why here in America, time has become everyone’s ticking bomb waiting to blow up in a second’s notice if we don’t stay on top of it. Time makes me nervous. I’m one of those people who was late enough to school when I was a kid that I absolutely despise being late. I would call it a mental disorder, but it hasn’t been diagnosed or treated in any way so I’ll just say its my special personality trait. I’m so honestly paranoid about being late someplace that I will show up 20 minutes before I am scheduled to be there just because that is the only time I could feel completely comfortable.
I was late to class today. I have to admit it was such a stupid decision to do what I did. Let me tell the story and then explain why I was stupid. I have two classes back to back on separate campuses on tuesdays and thursday. The campuses are spread out so far that my school uses a trolly system to cart students between campuses. It’s about a fifteen minute walk from one campus to another…which happens to be the amount of time in between my two classes. So I decided to be smart and drive to the furthest campus hoping to cut my time in half driving back for my next class…well long story short, I ran into traffic on the way back, circled the filled parking lot, and ended up parking in a faculty and staff lot (which by the way is a big no no). Probably not making that mistake again. As a result, I was 8 minutes late to class. As I got into class my professor was in the process of reading James 1…oh the irony. So I disrupted the class by being late and interrupted bible reading…there goes my credibility.
One of the major phrases I picked up on last semester while I was in South Africa was “TIA”. The phrase simply means: “This is Africa.” I was intrigued by such a culture who put time in its own category, rather than cheaply trying to make it the invisible big brother. Time to them was simply a means to measure the sunrise to the sunset and have a simple structure as to when to get things done during the day. They don’t have “Time-cards” or “Time-sensitive” mail (to some extent), and the phrase “time to go” isn’t an interruptive goodbye. Their day would be deemed more successful if they spent time pouring life into a fellow South African, even if that meant they made no money and lost profit on their goods….God forbid, thats a cardinal sin in the US. (please excuse my sarcasm) The South African culture seems to be centered around this idea that “we as a whole don’t have any control over time or the circumstances it brings, so there’s no reason to try to control the uncontrollable.” For these people, waiting for a taxi is like a social gathering where they meet up with folks they haven’t seen in a week. The man selling fruit on the side of the road, won’t go home until he’s done talking with his neighbor. Whenever the taxi cab is late to its destination the people look at each other and say “TIA.”
The video at the beginning is a song called “What I’ve done” by Linkin Park. It is almost a complete rewind of the history of not only America but many parts of the world. The song talks about erasing the past of what we’ve done and allowing grace to clean the slate of our bloody history. I find it rather interesting that although they are a secular band, the concept of grace seems pretty consistent with what the Christian faith talks about; cleaning the slate of our sin.
We live in a society so driven by time, yet we spend countless hours updating our facebook or blogs (oops), when 10,000 miles southeast of here people gather around a taxi cab sharing stories of their lives simply because thats how they interact. The only stories we share seem to be done over our black berry phones or three and a half word twitter updates. I find it interesting how the majority of Jesus’ teaching was done in stories, and the only time the bible explicitly says where Jesus and his disciples were going was when it records them actually going there.
This idea of ministry in action intrigues me a lot. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of missions organizations based out of an office building. Don’t get me wrong there are amazing people and things that happen through these organizations, but I beg to question what actually gets done if the only thing that leaves the building is paper and emails. We have been tricked by society to believe that the only difference we can make takes a 7-10 business day time period and a bunch of big whig signatures to even put a small dent in the problems of this world.
Across the street from my apartment complex is a man that sleeps at the bus stop nearly every night. Around the block on the stairs to our neighboring community college is another man who spends his nights covered in newspaper and a few trash bags. More than likely, as I type from this air conditioned apartment room, there are thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children within a hundred mile radius of where I am falling asleep under the smoggy skies of LA. I don’t have much room to talk when it comes to doing anything about it, because I’ve only been able to reach out a few times to people who have deliberately asked for my help, but I pray that changes.
So in the 10 minutes you spent reading this blog entry rather than doing your homework (like me), that was another ten minutes of your life where you could have erased the past from your life by the grace of God and changed the future. I know what I can do…Do you?
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