By Ezekiel Nabieu
Our individual lives and the life of our planet have to come to an inevitable end it should be borne in mind. The Catholics have prophesied that Jesus Christ is not likely to return to this earth but have not said that the world will not come to an end.
As the year drew to an end it was timely for us to reflect on what we had done during the year towards the enhancement of the quality of life of our fellow citizens. Have the religious ones among us drawn closer to their maker? Or have others been feeding fat their human gods and idols?
All our lives we have been slaves of time. If it were not prostituting the most solemn metaphor we know we might speak of half of mankind as crucified upon a clock. Time, time, time has dogged us like a demon since our tender years.
Cast your mind back to childhood and recall how you were haunted by time, what were the most hateful remarks we ever heard as children, and heard every day? ‘It’s time to go to bed and then: It’s time to get up.’
This enslavement to time does not end in childhood. Our bondage becomes closer over time. When the cry fades from our ears “Time for school”,“time for homework”,“time for games etc., it only gives way to another form of time slavery.
The minutes are so important now that many people are even compelled to “clock on”.
It can be strange to think that time has no real existence. It is only a category of human thought or it depends on the imagination. There are no watches, clocks or calendars in heaven. Eternity is not time drawn-out but timelessness. We humans are obliged to think of time because we have an awareness of successiveness, and to tidy up the experience of successiveness we think in terms of the category of time.
You remember when we were children how we considered time to be going on too slowly. This is because we were always wishing the time away or even to be skipped so that we come to some party or to Christmas or to the holidays. We always wanted to grow up. If when we were ten somebody guessed us as twelve we were quite proud. We would refer to some poor, unfortunate child six months younger than ourselves as ‘that kid’. And nothing our parents could say to us could prevent us wishing time foolishly away.
Many people are still wishing life away in their teens. They fall in love perhaps and a few years pass before they marry. They haven’t the patience to say “Let us enjoy what we have now,” they just long for the years to pass before they can have a nest of their own. And then the children come and they start wishing when the children grow up or when they would go to school.
And if things are difficult they start wishing for the children to be out at work and earning and by this time they are getting middle-aged and grey and then father starts looking for the time when he will retire.
The folly of it. If only somebody would teach us quite young to live in the ‘now’. Many people are old before they learn that great and precious lessons of life. It is when they see very little else of life left that it begins to dawn on their silly minds that they have been wishing the gift away.
I believe that God gives glory to every period of life and that people who are wise and live with him learn how to take the glory from each succeeding age.
They seize the moment. If you ask some people about the most glorious period in their lives the biblically-minded is likely to say NOW. There are some senses in which God’s time is always ‘now’.
The future is not ours. People are fond of saying to the young: “you have the future,” well can you be sure of it? In the language of the bookmaker can you call it a ‘cat’?
Be a now person. Prosperity consists NOT in having prospered but in prospering. There are few mistakes more common and more tragic than to count on the future. Cecil Rhodes planned big things for his own future and also for Africa but died at 49 saying: “So little done; so much to do.” Keats died at 25: Shelly at 30; Byron at 36. Friends had prophesied a great future for each of them, but none of them reached middle age. Are youths reading this? The lesson here is that you cannot count with absolute confidence on tomorrow.
Again I say seize the moment! The trouble is that when God says ‘Today’ we so often say ‘Tomorrow’. Tomorrow I will begin the new life. ‘Tomorrow’ I will walk with God. And so the years pass. Will death come and still find you saying Tomorrow?
One of the favourite words with John Wesley and Charles Wesley and all the leaders of the Evangelical Revival was the word ‘Now’. It was always the word with true evangelical preaching.
Even now at your earnest desiring, the Holy Spirit could enter your heart and cleanse it from evil, to break the power of cancelled sin to give you freedom where before you were in bondage and victory where before you were in defeat.
You are well advised to keep your head while all others are losing theirs. At the point in time when the vast majority of our neighbours were enjoying themselves there were others who were mourning the loss of their loved ones with whom they revelled last year.
Not all of us who were celebrating will be alive for next year’s celebrations. Life is like that. Isaac Watts hymn states “Time, like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away…” I may add even its daughters. In the midst of life we are in death and in the midst of death we are in life.
Some visited the cemeteries for remembrance of where their loved ones were buried while others including professed Christians indulged in such unchristian practices as pouring libation and talking to the dead. All excesses should be avoided because there may be yet another Christmas and New Year for you.
The end of the year was time for stock taking by all sober-minded persons as we said farewell to 2015 and welcomed 2016. The word of the Saviour to you is “Now! Today, if you hear my voice.”
(C) Politico 26/01/16
