Time And Beyond Time

“If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.” –C. S. Lewis

"He has put eternity into man’s heart.” –Ecclesiastes 3:11

It’s interesting how we have to grow into the concept of time. As far as I can tell, time for our one year-old exists in two dimensions: now or never. One or the other. No in-between. I think Esme believes with all her being that if I am not giving something to her immediately, she is never her whole life ever going to have it—the concept of “wait a minute” doesn’t exist, much less waiting until tomorrow. Thus the frantic, frenzied screams of utter despair if she doesn’t get something now.

In Revelation there are many references to God as being outside of time: he was, and is, and is to come; he is praised forever and ever. With him one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8). He is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you (2 Peter 3:9), which is eerily similar to how it feels when I’m trying to tell a screaming Esme that she has to wait so I can cut up her fruit before giving it to her.

Time even for us contracts and expands depending on our experiences and perspective, but God is beyond time itself. C. S. Lewis gives the example of how God is outside of time the way an author is outside of the timeline of the story he writes. He may put the book down and think about the character without it taking any time within the storyline of the book itself. Only, of course, God does not hop from one time-series to another; he is not in a time-series at all.

This means he can be infinitely with me in my now; that he is with me in my moment in a more infinite way than anyone in my own time-world could be. In a sense, he feels my momentary pains and joys forever, and thus he understands me, knows me more deeply and fully, than anyone else could.

On the other hand, he has the long view in mind. How can I explain the concept of years or decades to Esme? Yet that is how God sees us. How can you even quantify our earthly lives in the context of eternity? Is it a nanosecond, or less? Certainly significant, but almost relatively obsolete? Yet here we are, viewing our lives in hours or weeks or years, when what God is about is suiting us for eternity. We complain about not getting what we want, when God cares about changing us into who we will be; we feel that suffering is unbearably unending, when God sees the reward, the crown and glory, the new bodies, that will be ours forever. If we really understood that, what would not be worth going through?

We are born into an eternity of forever-nows. But I see how two year-old Elijah asks “after nap?” and four year-old Eric asks “tomorrow morning?” and six year-old Ellie can count down the five weeks of summer left. We become increasingly self-absorbed in our time-worlds until we cannot conceive of anything outside of it, yet God was, is, and is to come. He is the first and last, the source and end, the creator and consummator, he is all of our time-world and yet outside of it. He is forever with us in our moments, yet infinitely patient as only one outside of time can be.

Part-Time Surgeon

I say often that I’m lucky to be able to work part-time, but what I don’t often mention is that it’s also harder to be good at what you do when you work part-time. Any part-timer has less experience than someone working full-time, but this is painfully true when it comes to operating, where volume matters. The more cases you do, the more skill and confidence you build. I suppose one could be high-volume but still a poor surgeon, but no matter how naturally gifted one is, it’s hard to rise to the skill level of those with drastically greater volume. I do in one month one-third of the cases that my full-time colleagues do in one week. I know I could be someone churning out thirty cataract surgeries a day, but there is simply no way to do that if I only work two days a week.

And it’s more than the volume. It’s the fact that I’m less available outside of the OR to follow-up on perioperative issues. I have less time or space to innovate or teach. I have less interaction with colleagues to debrief scenarios. And operating can be stressful: if I’m not on top of my game, someone is blinded (I suppose there are no part-time neurosurgeons or cardiothoracic surgeons for a reason).

And personally, it’s a hard thing to know I’m not the best at what I do: I’ve worked towards that my whole career. I found my niche, my passion, and exceled: if I wasn’t always the smartest, I was a quick learner who worked hard; I was naturally good with my hands and an effective teacher. But now, the most remarkable thing I can say about my operating is that I do it at all. I do find my work meaningful, and I know I still offer a lot, but I’m in some ways no longer the best, and it takes only the occasional complication to remind me of that.

Dave said once to me, “you have to really be humble.” And that’s true. Maybe this season is about learning to walk in humility with cheerful grace: admitting without shame when I need help, accepting unexpected outcomes as learning opportunities, counseling patients with thoughtful foresight rather than brash brevity. Reacting to judgment from colleagues with openness and a willingness to learn rather than defensiveness.

Learning how to walk in this place, though, without beating myself up or losing heart, is tough. I used to stay up all night replaying surgeries I did if they hadn’t gone perfectly, second-guessing every step, worrying since I wouldn’t be around to follow-up the next day. The loneliness, the not knowing any other part-time surgeons, was hard. This, more than anything, is what it means to me that I can’t have it all. I feel a deep, nearly inexplicable conviction that I should be home with the kids as much as I am, but this walking in career-humility is what it takes.

I see myself growing in it, though. I’m getting better at learning without beating myself up; I’m becoming less concerned with reputation; and through it all I do see the gift of being able to do what I do. As paltry as it may seem to full-timers, it is a privilege to be able to speak into and change the lives of the patients I have, to be in a world outside of the home where I can exercise different gifts, and I don’t take that for granted, however much I’ve had to give up.

The Trinity

“[T]he mysterious something which is behind all things must be more than a person… something super-personal… The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God.

“As you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you don't leave behind the things you found on simpler levels; you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you couldn't imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.. On the Divine level, you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being.. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube.

“All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love’. But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.. in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I’ve been thinking about the Trinity: it started with my studying the Holy Spirit in response to a question asked in small group, which led me to realize how less aware I am of the Spirit than of God the father and Jesus. Which led me to meditate on what it means that God is one God in three persons: not more one than he is three; not more three than he is one.

On one hand, it’s all incredibly mentally frustrating. Like trying to wrap your mind around something it just can’t grasp. I’ve heard lots of analogies—it’s like how Dave and I are separate people, yet we are one personality in the common language and intimacies and understandings we have—or how squares are separate two-dimensional shapes, yet come together to form a three-dimensional cube. But in the end, it’s something I can’t understand, and frankly, do I want a God that I can understand? Some argue that the Trinity itself is proof God is real: we never would have made up a God like this.

What I’ve found more fascinating to meditate on lately are the implications the Trinity has for, well, everything. If we are made in the image of God, and our ultimate purpose is to be loved by and absorbed into the life of God for all eternity, then the Trinity says so much about who we are and what we are created for. At the center of the Trinity is mutual, self-giving love. I like how Lewis points out that if God were not three persons, love would not have existed until the world was made: but God is love, and always was and will be love, because of the fellowship that exists in the Trinity. We were made in the image of a three-personed, forever-loving, unceasingly-dynamic God, and so we each long for those things: fellowship, understanding, response, and we find fulfillment in self-giving love.

We don’t have an autocratic, unipersonal God who existed without love until the world was created and thus could not have in himself been love. We don’t have a polytheistic, relativistic system with multiple gods: there is only one I-am God that we follow.

Sometimes I look at the created world, and it’s as if they are all singing the song of the Trinity: all bent to one God, but living out at the same time an ebb and flow, a giving and responding, an enjoyment in togetherness.

I think about what this means for community: how C.S. Lewis said when three people are friends and one dies, one of the remaining friends loses part of the second remaining friend as well, because the third had brought something out of the second that the first could not have seen otherwise. I see that when I’m together with a close group of girl friends, or in how my kids bring things out of each other.

So suddenly I’m glimpsing the Trinity everywhere, and for once I feel like I’m able to get past the mental entanglement (and mild anxiety) that word always brought, and enjoy what it means. I do an exercise now where when I read a part of the Bible, I ask myself, what can I see of the Trinity here? And suddenly it’s playing out all over the place: specific references to each person of the Trinity, yet interchangeable pronouns and meanings that flow out of their oneness. It’s like seeing an aspect of God I’d never really looked for before.

Journal Excerpt

Dear Esme,

Your main interest in life seems to be giving me heart attacks. You cannot ambulate on a flat surface, but you see no reason why you can’t do so down a flight of stairs. God forbid we attempt to carry you down the stairs or make you go down belly-down feet-first.

You like to head-dive off the edge of couches, suck on the ends of bottles of toilet cleaner, and today you noticed I was mopping and immediately slid over to lick the soapy floor. You specialize in finding trachea-sized items despite our childproofing attempts—small shells, fake coins, lego pieces, marbles—which you then enjoy rolling around in your mouth mysteriously until someone freaks out and makes you spit it out.

We got through three kids without needing gates for the stairs or covers for all the sockets. Now I’m figuring out why those were invented.

Love,

Mommy

Hope

"Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.”

- The Lord of the Rings, p. 922, J.R.R. Tolkien

I’ve been doing a study of the Holy Spirit recently to answer a question that came up in our small group, and I came across this reference in a sermon by Tim Keller. He was describing how being filled with the Holy Spirit is like and yet totally unlike being drunk. Alcohol fills us with joy, warmth and courage, but by knocking out reality. Being filled with the Holy Spirit shows us more of reality: it heightens our understanding of life; it is like truth shining. And if we have that reality and hope, what is there to worry about? He talked about how it was like Sam, traveling with Frodo through Mordor, and seeing beyond the darkness a beauty that smote his heart. Seeing that the Shadow was but a small and passing thing; having hope.

I’ve been thinking about hope lately, because we’ve been studying through Revelation with said small group, and I think so much about the book is to give its readers hope. It’s like that story about two people in prison, one told that his family and all he loved is gone, another told his family was alive and waiting for him, and how the first died but the second lived. Or about two people screwing widgets on in a tiny room all day, one told he would be paid ten dollars per day, the second ten million per day, and how the second lasted longer in the job than the first. Our hope in the future determines how we live today.

What determines our hope? I’ve been thinking about the difference between faith and hope—faith is what I believe in. It’s what I know. But hope is an emotive expectation: it is belief mixed with will and desire. As Luther wrote, “faith resteth in the understanding, hope in the will.” I have faith that my boss will pay me tomorrow; I have hope that with that money I can go on a road trip. I have to have faith in my boss to work at all, but it is my hope for the road trip that lets me stick through tough times at work.

That’s why hope in God and the future he reveals to us in Revelation is so great. Of course, the future is full of objective truth that all of us can put our faith in, but since God created me, and knows me better than anyone, he also better than anyone knows what it is I hope for. He knows my desires and feelings; what I delight in and what I suffer through, and the more I learn about the reality of who he is, where he dwells, and what he has in store, the more I find hope that puts daily things in perspective.

We all need hope to live. Maybe that’s why God calls himself a God of hope, and why being filled with the Holy Spirit causes us to “abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). I think of Proverbs 13:12—“hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life”—and I think of the literal tree of life, the one we forfeited in Eden but that will be waiting for us in eternity.

We visited an assisted living facility with the kids today to hand out daisies from our yard. The residents were parked in wheelchairs on either side along a hallway, just staring off into space. Some of the ones we handed flowers to brought them to their faces, but instead of smelling some tried to eat them, and that oddly reminded me of Esme, who had just done the same thing. Both ends of life, but one with bright eyes and squirmy skin stretched with fat; the other with glassy eyes and paper-thin, wrinkled stillness (“I didn’t know people could be so old,” Ellie said. “Really?” I said. “Yeah,” she replied, “I thought they died before they got that old”).

My hope in heaven now is hope in a place where there will be rest, fulfillment of all aspects of who I am and what I enjoy, and intimate understanding. Since, you know, I’m in a period of life full of unpredictable sleep, no me-time, and where it takes real effort to connect with adults. But I imagine when I’m at the end of life, I’ll be hoping in a new body, in eternal community instead of loneliness. I imagine it makes all the difference, and the greater the suffering, the more difference it makes. In the end, I don’t need to distract myself with leisure or fantasy: I need to sink my teeth into the reality of scripture, the source not of distraction or defiance, but real hope.

Potty Training Number Three

I feel like I stepped into a nudist colony today. There have been signs for a while that Elijah was ready to start potty training—I tend to be of the “wait until they’re ready” camp as the parents I observe pushing their kids into it seem to go through a whole lot more trouble, not that I’m saying there’s necessarily a right or wrong way to do it—so by ready, I mean ready. Always poops the same time of day. Informs me reliably of poops and dislikes the feeling of poop against his bottom (resulting in strange contortions during diaper changes). Has read all the potty books we have, observed older siblings going through the routine, and been subtly brainwashed for weeks (“look how cool going potty is! Don’t you think you’d like to learn sometime?”). Finally, we got him undies, which convinced him to start trying.

We go through the same routine for all of them: get them naked and constrained to the less-carpeted ground floor with a small potty in a central location. Pump them full of fluids. Sit them on the potty every hour or so to get them used to trying; ask them every ten minutes in between if they need to go. Typically there’s a lot of sitting with no results, then an accident or two, at the start, then maybe an accident mixed with actually getting some pee in the potty, then eventually getting it all in the potty, with less and less prompting. Then typically two to three days of this goes on before they poop. Then you transition into undies, learning to take them on and off, maybe transition to the big potty with an adaptor seat.

It was actually more fun potty training with the older two around. They all got naked together, and ran around like banshees shouting, “he did it!” whenever Elijah did (which embarrassingly was often when I wasn’t even around; Eric was the one who coached him through the first time), then they all got small treats together. And Elijah is just so cute naked. Something about the combination of his large frontal prominence and very child-like head, his skinny rib cage, his protuberant stomach which proceeds him as he runs around—it’s all just almost too much. If he weren’t already ours, I would really want to adopt him.

Later on today there was a huge thunderstorm that lasted for hours. The kids got frightened (“robbers!” Elijah exclaimed whenever the thunder sounded), and wanted to stay plastered on top of me the entire time, huddled under blankets. This on top of Esme being in a clingy stage had me feeling just physically spent, tired of heads butting my chest, elbows digging into my belly, little butts trying to fit one onto each thigh, little arms wrapping around my neck from behind. I felt like they were little leeches I had to peel off for bedtime.

Well, I think this must be what it’s like to be in the thicket of the little-kid years. Coaching someone through something we take for granted (it’s odd to think about having to learn to void selectively into a cavernous space after being swaddled every day of your life). Dabbling in human waste. Being practically suffocated with physicality. One day, I dunno—these tall adolescent youths will be asking me for the car keys or something while they sling their backpacks on over one shoulder looking all cool—and I’ll miss these days when they ran around in gleeful nakedness and wanted to enfold themselves into me. Elijah did pretty well today: a few more days of being quarantined with naked kids, coming right up…