I have experienced him as the very essence of Time, stretched across the planet, moving in stillness and brooding, reverberating power, deep in thought and plans for what we are yet to become.

                 Sometimes I sit and nibble my fingers, which is I suppose one of the behaviors some of us humans have when we are anxious and in the midst of something that seems overwhelming. We do worry a lot, though the Bible challenges us not to.  

                I do, though. And since I can remember, even when I was in fifth grade, I would look at my fingers and be distantly surprised at the white ridges of skin near the edges of my fingernails, where I had gnawed the skin. Surely I am not an animal, and yet in one sense I am a creature with similar unconscious behaviors. And the only reason I mention this is that it is sometimes a constructive thing to step back and look at ourselves as we are. I mean, we can never see ourselves completely as we are, as Scottish poet Bobby Burns wrote hundreds of years ago. I remember sitting in my high school English class listening to one of my teachers read that poem. I think it was Mr. Cain, who was a big black man with a passion for literature and teaching. In nineteen sixty-seven, it was really unusual to have a black teacher in a high school in East Tennessee. This was before desegregation, and there was terrible racial bias.

                I remember sitting in the barber’s chair feeling small and insignificant. I was fourteen years-old, and one of the men waiting his turn looked at me and said, “You, boy. You wouldn’t want to go to school with them. Right?”

                I choked out some reply. In truth, I didn’t know. I had no particular feelings either way. But I did feel the weight of that simmering hatred percolating just beneath the surface at the time. 

                But more recently, just a few moments ago, I nibbled the skin just above the thumbnail and worried about what I am attempting to write. Since I was in my late teens, I have felt God calling me to write this so that I have spent most of my adult life struggling to grasp how to translate this powerful sense of God and God’s Time I have felt. Nearly always it has been there like a powerful, reverberating heart beating deep within me.

                I have decided to capitalize the first letter in the word—Time—because it is far more than what we humans usually refer to when we mention it. We often simply track the time of day, and are constantly focused on our attempts to accomplish the overwhelming challenges we daily face within the limited bits of time we have.

                But with God, there is Time, which is the powerful, beating flow of years across the vastness of all there is or has been or ever will be. And I sense an awareness of this in the Holy Bible. The ferocity and power of the reality of this presence is often wrapped in the sheer magnanimity of his presence in the Universe that he created.

                               

                So what I have felt reverberating within me is not different from what so many have felt and sought to describe for many thousands of years. But how does one put into words the depth and implications? No wonder I nibble my fingers and thumbs. Just the challenge of this, and the nervous realization that some might not understand that I am a product of the Church and an extension of all we attempt to convey of God’s presence and everlasting power when we attempt to convey the truth of the Bible year after year.

                I do feel, however, that our challenge as we head into the future is to find new ways of expressing these essential truths regarding God. In order to be relevant to an audience that is changing more rapidly than perhaps at any other time in history, we must somehow find ways to convey the ferocity, the awe, and the majesty of God and our relation to him. We must find new words to bring to life for them and for ourselves these same truths about an entity that will always be with us, unchanging, and yet challenging each new generation to do the work necessary to make him relevant and exciting for each new time.

                If there is anywhere we have failed as a species, as a culture of humans, it is here. We have not done the work necessary to translate these truths which are our inheritance through the experience of our forebearers—most notably through the example of those in the Holy Bible. Perhaps, though, this understanding can only come through a personal connection with God. After all, isn’t that ultimately what the Bible—especially the New Testament—is urging?

                Our main failing may be that we have not done enough to emphasize this personal relationship. I certainly find nothing much about the personal relationship within my Protestant tradition. We refer to it often as a wonderful possibility and as something to strive for. But as far as I can see, there is little or nothing about how this is achieved, other than to advise people to pray and read the Bible. As a culture, our modern arts and literature fall far short of what geniuses of the arts achieved hundreds of years ago. 

                My writing is an attempt to begin a conversation which takes us nearer to the personal relationship and what we may sense when we connect with God. I do not pretend to be some expert, other than to note that I have been focused for many decades on coming nearer to God through a personal relationship. Though any of us can be saved instantly through the Holy Spirit, developing an ever more immediate relationship with God takes time, focus, and practice. We never get to the end of where this can lead us. 

                My writing is, in the final analysis, an effort to describe God and God’s time as I have experienced it in the hopes that doing so may help us begin the process of making God relevant for a culture that appears to have lost any sense of God’s reality or of the certainty that we cannot survive without him.