Lost in a Moment

Have you ever had an experience where time seemed to stand still? You know what I mean, you're praying for what seems like hours, but when you look up only a few minutes have passed. Maybe you're listening to a sermon, and are so engrossed in what is being said, you can't believe 45 minutes has passed so quickly. I have that experience a lot. Sometimes when I read, I lose all track of time. If I'm reading fiction it's as if I leave this world, and enter another.

In times like these, the world around you seems to fall away, and time as you know ceases to function. Maybe you become more aware of every passing millisecond as if it were an hour, or perhaps you become less aware of time so that an hour passes in mere moments. Maybe it is a matter of focus, you focus on something so intently that time ceases to be important.

At look at moments like these as foretastes of eternity. When we step out of this world, and into the New Heavens and New Earth, time as we know it will cease. No past. No future. Just one eternal present that stretches on for infinity. In eternity hours will be moments and milliseconds will be centuries.

Of course, this is mostly speculation on my part. It is hard to say what eternity will be like. It is a category completely beyond mortal comprehension. Time is so woven into the fabric of our existence that we cannot truly understand what a life without it would be like. Concepts like beginnings and endings; days, weeks, and years; decades and century; morning and evening; and even now and later, drive so much of our thinking. At times, we even speak of eternity past and eternity future.

These time lapses or frozen moments, whatever we choose to call them are perplexing. It would seem that as creatures deeply rooted in time, we would not be able to "lose track." But we do. How do we explain such experiences? Maybe we aren't as rooted in time as we think. Maybe we were created for eternity, and just maybe every so often eternity breaks in to remind us that time is running out.

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