We live in a house in which there are clocks in almost all rooms. They are synchronised on Sundays when they are wound and put right but as the week goes on, they drift apart, affected by air pressure and temperature and all the other things that old clocks are influenced by. One thing is certain is that apart from the annual gaining of an hour in the autumn when all clocks go back due to a quirk of how time and planetary movements work, it is not possible to turn back the clock.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend which went along the lines of, if we were our young selves, could we do again what we did twenty and thirty years ago, in what may have been our prime. The answer, we decided, was a resounding ‘no’ because all the other surrounding factors are different. Time and people change and at the risk of being maudlin, things cannot be again what once they were.
That thought takes me to Isaac Watts’ famous hymn, often associate with Remembrance Sunday, ‘Our God our help in ages past.’ The sons (and daughters) of time ‘fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day’ and yet God who was formerly our help becomes our hope. As we cannot redo what once we did so God causes the future to be more exciting than the reality of the past has been. Have a look at number 132 in Singing the Faith.
Isaac Watts wrote, ‘Our God our help…’ at the beginning and then John Wesley altered it to ‘O God…’ Whether you prefer the personal ‘our’ or the grander ‘O’ is a matter for opinion but the sentiment is the same. God bridges time with all its changes. There have been other changes including the omission of some stanzas but the core message is unchanged just as God is unchanged in the face of time. We are transient and God is immortal; we are changed by time even as God shifts from being God of yesterday to the God of today and of tomorrow.
That perspective, in part at least, makes the mystery of life less mysterious.
A Prayer
Lord our God, we thank you for all our yesterdays and we pray for your gracious presence in our tomorrows. Help us to make the most of todays so that in our living of them, we reflect praise and honour on you God, ‘to endless years the same.’ Amen.