Mark 12:41-44, And he sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
No, I’m not writing about Cindy Lauper’s Time After Time. Today’s topic is “Time out of time.”
Time is fascinating. From a scientific perspective, there is no agreement as to what time is or whether it exists. Einstein’s famous quote about relativity gives us some honest insight into the elasticity of time. He said:
When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.
Albert Einstein
Despite science’s lack of understanding, we are acutely aware of our personal time, especially when someone asks for some of it for their endeavor. As our lives tentatively regain a modicum of our LBP (life before pandemic), we feel starved, impoverished of “our” time; our “me time” that we used to satisfy our hunger for touch, our need to read body language, to covert joy from overheard conversations, our thirst for social environments.
How can we respond to our church’s request for help in cleaning the building? How can we continue to teach our children science at home, now that our employer is making demands on our time for their recovery? How can we give out of our meager “me time”?
This “poverty of me time” is an angst that is rarely spoken of, but it is a growing condition in many people, many Godly people; it is expanding from insistent to incessant. Yet, Jesus was pleased with the poor widow in Mark 12:41-44, when she gave out of her poverty. Jesus expects no less from us. We may have a good salary, good health, and a recovering 401K, but as Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, “Time and tide wait for no man.” We all have the same amount of time, what shall we do with ours?
Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash
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