Time Peace

By Ellen Santilli Vaughn

In a world that runs with the need for speed, we feel time pushing us, sometimes even mastering us, as we rush from one thing to the next. Time is as familiar as the clock on the wall, yet it’s also a mystery. For poets, philosophers, songwriters, and scientists, time and eternity are frontiers as rich and compelling as the origins of the cosmos and the nature of God.One of the emerging writers and thinkers of our day, Ellen Vaughn, takes us on a stirring journey through this topic that touches us all. How can time-bound humans relate to a limitless God and enjoy his peace? Time Peace examines how we experience time in life’s fleeting moments. It explores timekeeping through history and in different cultures and introduces the unique Christian distinctive about it. It soars through the space-time continuum in an intriguing exploration of how science and philosophy illuminate biblical accounts. It helps readers take these truths and apply them to everyday life, freeing us to live at peace in time—and to leave a legacy that lasts for eternity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Aug 30, 2009
• ISBN: 9780310864400

Ellen Santilli Vaughn

Ellen Vaughn is an award-winning author whose works include The Strand and Gideon's Torch, co-authored with Charles Colson. Former vice president of executive communications for Prison Fellowship, Vaughn has also served as a speech writer and fund-raising consultant. She and her husband, Lee, live in Virginia with their three children.

Book preview

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Also by Ellen Vaughn

Radical Gratitude

Kingdoms in Conflict

(Charles W. Colson and Ellen Vaughn)

Being the Body

(Charles W. Colson and Ellen Vaughn)

The God Who Hung on the Cross

(Dois Rosser and Ellen Vaughn)

Rags, Riches, and Real Success

(Dallen Peterson with Ellen Vaughn)

The Strand

Gideon’s Torch

(Charles W. Colson and Ellen Vaughn)

The Body

(Charles W. Colson and Ellen Vaughn)

Against the Night

(Charles W. Colson and Ellen Vaughn)

It’s All About Him

(Denise Jackson and Ellen Vaughn)

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ZONDERVAN

TIME PEACE

Copyright © 2007 by Ellen Santilli Vaughn

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

ePub Edition June 2009 ISBN: 0-310-86440-2

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vaughn, Ellen Santilli.

    Time peace : living here and now with a timeless God / Ellen Vaughn.

      p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-310-26726-3

     1. Time — Religious aspects — Christianity. 2. Time. I. Title.

BT78.V38 2007

231.7 — dc22

2006039531

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Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth and Associates, Inc. 8600 Crestgate Circle, Orlando, FL 32819.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers printed in this book are offered as a resource to you. These are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the part of Zondervan, nor do we vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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07 08 09 10 11 12 13 • 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

With great love to

Emily, Haley, and Walker,

my fellow time travelers

in the great Adventure

1

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

PART ONE

Experiencing Time

1 Curiosity

2 Wonder

3 Time Flies

4 Time Hurts

5 Haven’t Got Time for the Pain

6 Falling Ashes

7 Devouring Beast or Purring Pet?

PART TWO

Managing Time

8 Keeping Time

9 From Sticks and Boxes to Ion Clockses

10 Nothing Will Slow Us Down

11 Wild Jesus and the Secret of Time

12 Pronto!

13 Extremes: The Sloth and the Controller

14 Slug Time: The Long and Slimy Trail

15 Steward Little

16 Mission: Control!

17 How Big Is Your God?

18 What If?

PART THREE

Re-Viewing Time: A New Paradigm

19 The God of Surprise

20 Intricate Riddle

21 Einstein on My Mind

22 All Things Weird and Wonderful

23 Stranger Than Fiction

24 Time and Light

25 Science’s Sharper Image

26 Time and the Quantum World

27 Time Dimensions

PART FOUR

Enjoying Time

28 Counting Our Days

29 Enter into Joy

30 Time in His Hands

31 Leaving a Legacy that Transcends Time

32 The Rest of the Story

33 Receiving the Present

Notes

About the Publisher

Share Your Thoughts

1

He has made everything beautiful in its time.

ECCLESIASTES

1

With Gratitude

1

I’m enormously grateful to the friends and family who helped to make this book possible. Andi Brindley and Walt and Diana Santilli shared their beautiful homes as writing retreats. Patti Bryce, Craig Falwell, Gail Harwood, Lee Vaughn, and Hugh Whelchel were kind enough to read the manuscript and give helpful feedback and critiques, as did Dr. Beverly Jamison and Dr. Jay Richards, whose insights and wit are both so brilliant. I thank Pat Macmillan for the opportunity to enjoy his incomparable brainstorming powers on the topic of time. I’m extremely grateful to Admiral Tim Ziemer and Connie Leach-man for sharing their stories of God’s faithfulness in times of great loss. Huge thanks to Norma Vaughn (Saint Norma) for her help with Vaughn World at various junctures during the writing process.

I appreciate the prayer support of my sisters and brothers at McLean Presbyterian Church. I am grateful to my agent, Robert Wolgemuth, and Andrew and Erik Wolgemuth, for their solidarity and commitment to providing socks for the Vaughn youth. At Zondervan, John Sloan’s creative insights and passion about writing and time made this project quite fun; thank you also to Bob Hudson for his editing excellence.

Thank you Emily, Haley, and Walker, for your flexibility regarding my writing schedule, and thank you for your enthusiasm for this book. And thank you, Lee, for your constant care and abiding love. I am glad we are partners in this journey through time. You are the best.

ELLEN VAUGHN

AUGUST, 2006

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PART ONE

EXPERIENCING TIME

CHAPTER 1

Curiosity

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God has made everything beautiful for its own time.He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.¹

ECCLESIASTES 3:11

My curiosity about time starts with three things.

The first has to do with how big God is and how small we are. People often say that Christianity is about a relationship with God. True. But as I get older, I wonder: what does it really mean for a mortal being to have a relationship with One who dwells in eternity, who lives in cosmic dimensions beyond our conception?

How can a human biped, so trapped in time, really live in connection with a God who transcends it? How can His reality shape our own experience every day? What are we missing when we think only in terms of the here and now, so strapped to that watch on the wrist . . . in the face of eternity?

The second issue that piques my curiosity about time is less cosmic and more practical. It has to do with how people experience time every day.

As I’ve polled others, I’ve found that many have a pretty negative feeling about time. Ask fifty people — random people who don’t happen to believe in God — about their relationship with time, and most will sigh and roll their eyes. Time? There’s never enough of it! They’ll voice frustration, burnout, and guilt. Some will tell you how they wasted their best years in the past or how they worry about the future. Few will say that they’re at peace with time.

Here’s the rub: now ask fifty people — random people who do believe in God — the same question. If you catch them off guard, before they formulize the proper spiritual response, you’ll get many of the same answers as from nonbelievers. For the most part, you’ll hear the same stress, regret, and anxiety about time and its passage. Sadly, for many of us who are earnestly committed to Christ, this key perspective of everyday life is much like the vantage point of those who don’t believe in Him.

If this is so, we’re missing something vital, certainly in our experience, but also in our ability to demonstrate that God is real. Today many Christians are known for their political views or how they school their children or how they dress or talk. These are all fine things. But perhaps many of us are missing one of the most fundamental distinctions of real Christianity: peace. Is there a supernatural tranquility, joy, and freedom in the rhythms of our everyday lives, a heartbeat that is clearly not of this world? What really makes us tick? What motivates us from the inside out? Do we demonstrate, in everyday life, a distinctive relationship with time?

The third issue that intrigues me is how I am haunted, in a good way, by the words of Psalm 90. It’s the oldest Psalm, written by Moses when he was old and his long white beard, parted like the Red Sea, fell to his waist. Moses contrasts God’s eternal permanence with his own fleeting lifespan. He pleads with God, Teach me to count my days! Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may . . . be glad all our days!

I’m like Moses, though I have no beard. Every morning I am more and more aware of the fact that my days are fleeting. The older I get, and the more I learn about God and His grace, the more I want to grab hold of His ankle, so to speak. Like Jacob wrestling with God in the Old Testament, I want to shout, I won’t let You go until You bless me! Teach me to count my days! Show me how to make them count, how to really live so that my days here on earth echo in eternity!

So yes, I am curious about this thing we call time. So basic, yet so mysterious. How does an earth-bound person really connect with an eternal God? How can we really live with distinction, at peace in a culture so full of stress and hurry sickness? And how do we live our days in gladness and satisfaction, like Moses prayed, making them count?

I’ve queried all kinds of people about these things. Almost all have resonated with this issue of time. Not time management, but how to grab the ankle of this most elusive and familiar element of our lives. The arrow of time hits a tender mark in the human heart; we long to be at peace with its passage. For most of us, such peace would be absolutely radical and life-changing.

This book thus grew out of curiosity, conversations, and my own growing convictions about a refreshed approach to time. Clearly it’s not a definitive study of such an enormous topic. But I hope it will take the reader, as it has me, on a journey of wonder, toward the end of newly discovering the God who is so far beyond us . . . and yet somehow too so close.

CHAPTER 2

Wonder

1

Nothing is too wonderful to be true.

MICHAEL FARADAY

Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies. We cover our deep ignorance with words, but we are ashamed to wonder, we are afraid to whisper ‘mystery.’¹

A. W. TOZER

God’s beyondness is unmistakable. Compared to Him, we are so small. His life is eternal, no beginning or end. Ours is fleeting, so brief in time.

Yet even in our limitations, we can know Him. He has scattered evidence of His magnificence throughout the universe, in the heights of the heavens and the invisible depths of the atom.

On clear winter nights, when we stare at the constellation Orion, we crane our necks with the same upward wonder as the ancients who first saw in this star-pattern a mighty hunter. We’re somehow linked with 2000 B.C. Job, shivering in a robe, staring in our smallness at the distant stars. For his part, Job said,

[God] is the Maker of the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south.

He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted.²

Job’s appreciation of the miraculous would have been multiplied if he had today’s tools.

Modern telescopes tell us that Betelgeuse, that bright star in Orion’s shoulder, is 3,000,000,000,000,000 — three quadrillion — miles away. It is 400 million miles wide, a violently roiling red inferno with a froth of fire casually flung like a scarf that streams ten million miles into space.

How big is the Being who made this thing? How vast is His measureless eternity?

We cannot conceive of the enormity.

Look at the constellation Andromeda. The Greeks named her after a mythical princess. She is home to an enormous spiral galaxy much like our own. And the distance to her? Here’s where our perspective on time must stretch, for we see Andromeda not as she is now, but as she was two and a half million years ago. That’s how long it takes for her light to reach our earth. If we climbed aboard a 747 and traveled at conventional airline speed — wearing some very warm clothes and a major oxygen mask — it would take two trillion years to reach her.

Yet God is above and beyond such time.

Take things the opposite direction, from the macro to the micro.

The dot on this i holds 500,000,000,000 particles of matter called protons. If you compressed one proton down to a billionth of its normal size, the spot that is left has no appreciable dimensions. It’s called a singularity. In mathematics, this term describes something that is patently indefinable, like 1/0. The notion of the present is similarly uncooperative: as soon as we say, This is now! it is gone. Though we talk about it all the time, the present does not really exist.

Now, moving to astrophysics, imagine all the stuff of the entire universe — the matter of galaxies, stars, planets, everything — packed into that inestimably small singularity. Then try to envision the explosive moment of creation. As writer Bill Bryson says, you’ll want to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is no safe place, because there is no where. No space. No time. From nothing, the universe begins.

Bryson writes, In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast . . .³

It’s not my intention here to present a case for God as the Creator of this beginning, in order to try to convince readers who don’t hold that point of view. Many experts have written winsomely, cogently, and comprehensively about the questions of origins and the evidence that One outside the universe made it and everything in it. My aim in this book is to consider the nature of what God has made, what such wonders show us about His nature and how God’s eternity can inform and transform human beings’ experience in time.

Scientific discovery can be metaphorical: its physical truths point to spiritual realities that are far more grand. Creation’s majestic wonders give a glimpse of the glory of the Creator who made them. Cosmology’s natural phenomena, particularly as they relate to time, point to even grander supernatural marvels and mysteries. They create awe, even holy fear at the unapproachable vastness of the mind of God. We’re left shaking our heads, humbled. How could One so huge possibly care about us?

Then comes the impossible part. This grand, unreachable God came to us.

The Bible says that in the fullness of time Jesus Christ came to earth. The Incarnation means that the Creator of the cosmos arrived on the planet — a blue marble in a universe ten billion light-years in diameter. He came in a human body . . . to a small town . . . as an infant.

Like a reverse Big Bang, the limitless God, the eternal super-intelligence beyond reckoning, compacted Himself into a six-pound swaddled bundle. He chose to subject Himself to the passage of earth-time, with its weariness, aging, longing, and death. Jesus lived in time . . . but His perspective was that of eternity.

What on earth can this mean for us?

There are tons of books about managing time, maximizing it, controlling it, organizing it . . . all toward the end of greater efficiency, less stress, better time management, less tooth decay. While these are important issues and we are all for healthy teeth, these are not ends in and of themselves. Perhaps the emphasis today on managing time has suppressed our ability to wonder. Perhaps our preoccupation with practicality has compressed our vision, as if human experience is as narrow as a pocket calendar, and God is but a celestial accountant. For the believer, a new experience of time is not dependent on managing it better. As we’ll see, it depends on developing a mind-blowing new paradigm altogether.

In addition to books about time management, there are also many specialized scientific tomes about time and eternity. There are reams of physicists’ papers on special and general relativity, the space-time continuum, quantum mechanics, and string theory. Most of them are incomprehensible to those of us who don’t have advanced degrees in physics.

The story is told of a Russian poet visiting London before the First World War. He got lost and was running late to an appointment. In his broken English, he asked a man on the street, Please, sir, what is time?

But that’s a philosophical question! the man replied. Why ask me?

He’s right, and there are hefty stacks of philosophical discussions about the nature of time as it relates to the nature of God. Christian philosophers take the fundamentals regarding what Scripture says about God and time, and arrive at different philosophical conclusions. Does God dwell in divine timeless eternity or timelessness and omnitemporality or unqualified divine temporality? Or relative timelessness?⁴

We don’t know.

What we do know is that God is far beyond our own experience. Eternity is more than we can comprehend. It is good to cultivate awe and wonder about such mysteries . . . because how we think about time, use time, and have peace in time — or not — depends on how we really think about God.

How big is He? Do we trust Him, really? Do we believe that He has given us enough time?

If we believe what we say we do — in a huge, sovereign, good God who created all things, including time, and has ordained both our days on earth and our entrance into eternity — we will not be anxious about time. We are in fact rich in it. We can enjoy God’s present. We can relax, and smile.

1

Parts of this book point to the grand vistas of cosmology, astronomy, physics, and what science’s theater can show us about the nature of God, time, and eternity. His wondrous enormity makes all the more eccentric His decision to cultivate, at great cost, relationships with mere human beings.

I’m no rocket scientist. Scientists themselves affirm that physics, on both the macro and the micro levels, is a field in which many understand nothing and none understands everything.⁵

But discoveries about the natural world reveal some of God’s invisible qualities . . . His eternal power and divine nature, so different from ours. Exploring the starry fields of His creation causes us to live on the edge of wonder. It scratches at a deep-down, curious itch. It assuages the sadness we sense when time slips so quickly away. It acknowledges the longing for eternity that is planted deep within our hearts. It makes us hungry for heaven in a way that helps us live better on earth.

Thus another part of this book is like any good Martha. It puts its hands on its hips, wearing an apron, and responds to the stargazing sections: So what? Anyway, it’s time for dinner!

Well, dinner is good. And the great thing about grand truths is that they are not esoteric factoids existing in a vacuum somewhere. Truth has practical consequences in everyday life. For example, when people first realized the earth was not flat, but round, that information had effects in their daily lives. For one, they no longer had to live in fear of