Daily Lesson for February 8, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 31 verses 14 and 15a:

14 But I trust in you, O Lord;

   I say, ‘You are my God.’ 

15 My times are in your hand . . .

Our times are in God’s hand.

Dr. King wrote in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail that, “time itself is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively.”

Father Time has no conscience, no sense of the justice of history. Father Time makes no promises. This is why time doesn’t really heal all wounds. It’s also why time cannot be trusted to work all things out to the good. Time isn’t really working for us. Time is a River, ebbing and flowing, neither moral nor immoral.

We cannot be redeemed in good time; for time itself is neither good nor bad. Time is not on our side. Time is instead what we make of it. 

And, time is what God makes of it. Time is not like a clock, set and fixed at the hand of a clock maker, then left to its own random devices. No; time is in God’s hand, today’s Lesson says.  In other words, time like the sands of hour glass, susceptible to shift, to tilt, to nudge, and even to reverse. 

Our times are in God’s hand. God has not left us and our world to simply our own devices. God has chosen to intervene in time.  Rather than allowing the sands of time to will simply run their inevitable course; God has entered time and has become — in Auden’s words, written during the dark days of WWII — “The Time Being”.

The dark days of winter are behind us. The sun did not disappear. Time has not run out. There’s yet more time to come. It is God’s gift to us. 

Let us make the most of it.