Waiting and Clocks

Those of you who heard me speak a few years ago may remember that I talked about waiting. God asks us not only to wait for him but also to wait PATIENTLY. (Ps 37:7, James 5:7) It's the last part that is hard even though we've all had lots of practice waiting. I remember waiting for Dad to come home so we could eat supper and, since it was in the days before 2-way radios, much less before cell phones, we didn't know how long we had to wait. My theory was that if we would just start eating he would come. Mom wasn't willing to test my theory, but when she did give in it always seemed to work. 

These days I've been waiting for other things like transcripts and a telephone call that the temp agency has found a post for me. I'm waiting to hear whether or not I've been accepted into the Occupational Therapy program next fall while trying desperately not to think of what happens if I don't get in. At least I know I won't hear anything before mid-March so it's no use being impatient before then. Transition also involves waiting. It just takes time to develop friendships and there doesn't seem to be much that can hurry that along.

I've been reading Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death. His main point in the first chapter is that every tool we use for communication is like a metaphor that affects how we look at reality. He borrows from Lewis Mumford's book Technics and Civilization and uses clocks as an example. I don't give clocks a second thought. They are there to make sure I get to work and class on time. Add an alarm and it gets me out of bed on time in the morning. Mumford says that clocks produce seconds and minutes which has "the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences." The clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers and now time-servers. We no longer pay any attention to the sun and seasons since the world is made up of seconds and minutes and has more authority than nature. "With the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events."

That last phrase brought me up short. If the simple ticking of a clock makes it that much easier for us to forget that we are living for eternity, we are in even greater danger now when ads declare, "That is so 17 seconds ago!", as if we couldn't possibly wait less than half a minute for some bit if data.

The last few months have added something else to the list of things I'm waiting for. I know I will see John again but it seems like the wait will be very long. And I wonder what I will do in the meantime? I know it will be easier to wait patiently if I can remember to see the wait in light of eternity rather than the ticking of a clock or the speed of a download.