Time in a Bottle
My story begins sometime when I was about 12 years old. I had my own space in our new house, and lots of it. A hidden door in my closet opened to an attic I had claimed as my secret room. I covered the walls with song lyrics and would bury myself in blankets in the winter, and sweat to death in the summer, while I spent hours upon hours in my little bunker, writing poems, painting, and listening to music. The occasional spider or spooky shadow sometimes sent me bolting out into the closet like the kids from Narnia trying to find their way home.
On a clear summer night, I would sit outside my window on the roof, and stare at the stars. I had it in my head that I was in love with some boy from school. I never talked to him, and didn’t really know much about him, but I had this idea about love. It was self-sacrificing and deep. I didn’t care if he ever talked to me again, but I would daydream about him growing up, getting married and being happy. I would sit on my little roof and wish to the stars, and whisper, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Something about threes was important. Say it three times, I am not sure why. I think I had some sense of triunity, I knew that the threes held everything together.
Behind my parents house, there was a heavily treed creek, and further back, a small pond. I loved it back there. After school, I would lay and read on this huge fallen tree that made a bridge across the creek. My dad was sure I had taken all the kitchen spoons somewhere in those woods. Some days, I hiked back to the pond, through the thick brush. I distinctly remember, on many a brisk fall evening, realizing I had missed the straight path and was caught in the middle of the thorn trees, and nettles, and spider webs, right when dusk was setting in. Panic crept up as the wind carved through my clothes. There was never a good way out, I would wish I could teleport myself. Trying not to think about what was stirring in the waist-high grass, I would just starting running like a maniac in full panic mode. I generally emerged with a few bloody scratches and the cursed nettles stinging like hell. My mom’s voice in my heading saying, “I am NOT buying you any more shoes!” But as I climbed up to the bank to the pond, the sun scattered all over the surface of the water, blinking like diamonds, and the sky a million shades of pink and purple, my recent trauma would melt away, forgotten, and I would say,”I love you, I love you, I love you.”
I loved that pond so much, I used to tell people I wanted my ashes scattered there when I died. Well, a third of them, I wanted a third in the ocean, and a third in the mountains somewhere. You know, threes. I used to think about death a lot, not in a morbid way, just in a matter of fact kind of way. I never really felt like I was part of this world. I never pictured myself growing up and doing all the traditional things people do. I would tell people, I was going to grow up and live on the beach in a VW bus, yep, I was going to be a bag lady and sell sea shells by the sea-shore. Until I was 19 of course, after that, I would most likely be dead. Just couldn’t picture living past 20. I would also plan that for some reason I was living past 20, I would just live vicariously through my best friend’s life, I would be her nanny and help raise her children, and love them as my own. Strange how things turn out.
I thought this through high school, so it didn’t bother me at all when I left my sophomore year and took my equivalency test to start classes at the community college. I didn’t mind missing prom and graduation, or the college experience, I just never expected to do those things anyway.
When I did eventually grow older than 19, my thinking did not really change. I got married about a month after my 22 birthday. I didn’t think about it ahead of time, we had known each other only a few months and decided to elope one weekend without telling anyone. I never thought I would get married. I got pregnant within a few months after that, and I just kept moving forward. I never thought I would have kids. Of course I was happy though, I loved my family, and I was grateful for my life. I just never expected it to happen that way.
For the next several years I was just busy just living, and I didn’t have a chance to think too much. Always in the back of my mind, though, I would still look at the stars and think, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Somewhere along my path, all the questions that I had been pushing down over the years, came popping up, like that little squirrel in Ice Age trying to plug all the holes. Maybe the cliché’ questions like, “Why am I here?” were a bit of a stretch, but I knew there was so much more than I could see. I had always felt like a vessel passing through, my soul watching out the window, trees and people whizzing by. Buildings and landscape until it just fades into a blur. Time and space ticking along, suppressing the eternity trapped inside.
You see, that’s what it is, God put eternity in all our hearts, and we go through life pushing it down, or trying to turn it into something else. We have eternity in our hearts because we are made in Gods image. Because he is eternal, we have a sense of eternity, an internal understanding. Yet we toil away in time, trying to hold on to what is already passing away.
We all know God. Not just an idea of a god, something that connects us all, or some sort of cosmic designer. We know HIM. Personally.
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what is made, so that we are without excuse. Romans 1:20
Obviously, we are born and begin at a given time, but God is eternal and has known us throughout eternity. He has always known outside time everything He would ever carry out inside time. He is in control of every aspect of time and space. We sometimes like to think of the universe as eternal. The universe cannot be eternal because it was created by God, and if it were not, there could be no purpose to anything. Something that’s eternal could not be designed because it would precede any designer, so that would make the universe and everything in it, right down to every subatomic quark, completely random and without purpose. So either you have random eternal matter, or an eternal designer , and that would, therefore, give everything in the universe purpose.
God tells us that the day will come when nothing we see will exist. He will put an end to time and space as we know it. Even death itself. Up to this point we have a choice, it’s simple really. Do we want life or death? There is only one source of life. God offers us eternity, as a free gift. Yet, sadly, we often choose darkness over light. We choose death.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Rev 20:13-15 Then I saw a new heaven and new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. Rev. 21:1
Last summer I was visiting my parents, and I again hiked back to the pond. My son and I braved the nettles and thorn trees with panic at dusk. The sunlight greeted us as we climbed the bank. Of course, time had moved on, the water was covered in moss and the overgrowth was so thick we could not get too close to the water. That’s the trouble with time, it keeps going. We look to the future with hope and faith, and to the past with judgement and regret. Trying to make our way to the things we want to find, but hold on to the things we lost, but we only grasp at dust.
In eternity, there will be no judgement, no hope or faith, for all is realized and we will see as we are meant to see. No more glimpses of what is to come, no more regret for things past. But, what remains forever will be the most important thing, LOVE.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:12-13
I know that this is what I want to cling to, that is why I am here on this planet. I know as I pass through in my vessel, those sparkles on the pond’s surface, and far up in the night sky, those people I meet along the way, my family, and my babies I hold tight, these are glimpses into eternity. This is where my heart lives. I cannot hold on to anything in this world, but I will listen to Him as He calls me from eternity, as I have heard Him since I was young, and I will answer Him back from time, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
The Rabbit Hole 