I once wrote to my future husband, sharing an idea that was percolating in my mind. “Imagine,” I wrote, “that I lay a ring on the ground. And a tiny bug is born within the confines of that ring. And the lifespan of the bug only lasts a teeny while for me, so he is dead before I pick the ring up. His entire existence was within that area, so that the ring contains his entire world.”
The bug was also referring to us, and the ring, our limitations, so we live our entire life stuck inside a ring that we never even think of escaping from.
I didn’t continue, fearing that he’d think the entire idea was weird, but even now, years later, I still remember the rest of the idea. The ring was just the start, but imagine that we, the ring owner, watch the entire life cycle of the bug, from beginning to end. It’s just a very short while for us, so we see this bug’s entire life.
Perhaps the easiest way to explain this is to imagine that we film the life cycle of this bug. Now, we can jump to any point in the film. We can watch the bug’s birth or the bug’s death or any other point of its brief life.
Now let’s apply the allegory to us again. We can look back at our memories or forward to what we imagine, but let’s step back for a moment, and imagine our life as a reel of film. Now, pick any moment on that reel and watch it.
Neville says that we’re not stuck by time or space. A distance of 10,000 miles is nothing, as is a specific day or time. The past and the future are ours.
When I read this today, I remembered that bug I wrote about. The idea I had then was that God could see our lives spread out before him, like the movie reel. And he could choose any millisecond of that time span to interact with, to enter, and to change the past, present, and future. Time has meaning only as a system of measurement for determining length. Like a movie producer cutting and splicing, time in God’s hands is mutable.
Now remember, God lives in me and I live in him. Therefore, we have the ability to see the film of our own life. We can see it stretched out before us and choose any moment to enter back into and make changes.
