Picking Your Pace
Sun 05 Jun 2011 Filed in:
ReflectionsI’ve been thinking about the trip we took. Getting there and getting home - particularly getting home - had an unavoidable unpleasant side effect. Those jets Boeing builds are wonderful machines, but the trouble with jets is lag. The human body, at least the one I occupy, was not designed to travel through multiple time zones in a matter of hours. The first time I crossed the Atlantic it was on the Queen Elizabeth, a Cunard ocean liner that took five days to traverse those five time zones, and my seven year old body didn’t experience jet lag (ship-lag?); I guess today’s ships are for leisure rather than for transportation.
I am not immune to valuing speed or imagining that I can somehow stretch a given block of time to include more than it was ever intended to hold. But in my saner moments I sometimes wonder why fast has become so important and instant so valued. After all, getting there, frustrating though it may sometimes be, ought to be enjoyed. And I wonder how difficult it will be for us western Christians to adjust to heaven where time will not matter. Perhaps it’s a good thing that we will be changed.
