Monday, December 7, 2009

Once Upon A Time, There Was The End

So I got thinking today... in some movies you might hear a line badly said that goes something like... Girl: "This is the end." Guy: "No, this is just the beginning." [End of movie.]  Okay, so maybe I haven't actually ever seen a movie like that, but I know that I've read it somewhere... People say: "The end... or rather, the beginning." But can the beginning of something have an end before it has begun to begin?  I found something comical in the whole idea... What if stories were written backwards?  "The End.  They got married. He visited her. Bobby met Sally.  Bobby was lonely.  Sally was lonely.  Once upon a time."

What if time was backwards?  For instance, what if, instead of growing older, we were growing younger?  If a building once built was old, but got younger just because it happened to be there when we were born? It's confusing, isn't it?  Wouldn't it be strange if there was no time at all?  If people ate when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, and worked when they were not doing the other two?  That would be an odd world.

"This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down."

[Gollum's riddle to Bilbo, from The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien] --if you don't know the answer to this, try and guess! leave your comments. :)

If there was no time, would we all live forever?  In heaven there is no time, but in Earth, we are bound by time. We must awake at a certain hour, be off to work at another, eat lunch between such and such a time, make sure dinner is on the table at this hour, you must get so many hours of sleep... and it all starts over.  And yet, this time during which we do pretty much the same things over and over again, is so filled with interesting things that we never truly experience something awful called monotony. The poor person who does encounter monotony during his journey through Life (or Time) must have so much taken out of his life in order to make it monotonous.  This is what his schedule would look:

Sleep.
Eat.
Work.
Eat.
Work.
Eat.
Sleep.
[repeat]  He eats the same thing for Breakfast, the same thing for Lunch, and the same thing for Dinner.  At work he does the same thing.  When he sleeps he never dreams.  His imagination is dead, and a reality colder than real reality has seemed to grip his mind.  What a sad life!

There is no monotony (or there should not be) for a Christian.  Every day we are challenged in different and sometimes interesting ways.  We are every day seeking new ways to serve our King, and every day we wake and exclaim: "This is the day that the Lord has made - Let us rejoice and be glad in it!"  If an Intelligent Designer made the Earth with so much beauty and so many happenings in nature, how can a human, who is so much more beloved than the sparrow [Matthew 10:29-31], experience of a life of monotony while serving Him? It's really impossible.  Monotony implies boredom; dullness.  If we really find the Christian life so bored and dull, then something is seriously wrong with our relationship with Christ.

In case you were wondering, I didn't have anywhere I was going with this.  I was just writing down my train of thought as it came. :-)  Comment with any further ideas or comments or anything.

2 comments:

A Voice From Now said...

The answer to the riddle is time, the most inexorable and unstoppable force of nature.

These are some profound questions you've raised, but I'm afraid a person can have a good relationship with Christ and still be bound in monotony because of things around them.

Ruby Jean Hopkins said...

Hello!

I think that the point I was trying to make was that life itself shouldn't be monotonous. After thinking and talking about it more with some people, I do realize there are times when God sort of takes us into a desert, where nothing happens and it seems like God is silent, but perhaps he's really testing our faith.

Something like this might be remotely monotonous, but given everything else that happens in life, my personal opinion is that it depends on the person's perspective. He can be bored because he wants so much more than what he has, or he can learn to take interest in the things that are happening around him.

Thanks for your comment - it made me think, and I am probably not totally right, but it's my perspective on things, and I'm still thinking through it. :) Feel free to post any other thoughts you have! I am open to new ideas.

In Christ,
~Ruby