Blog 3150 – 06.15.2024

On The Passage Of Time And The Usefulness Of That Reverse Gear

I heard words yesterday that challenge one of my long held beliefs or assumptions. The assumption is that time seems to pass faster as we get older. The words I heard yesterday are that children and old people have something in common – time passes very slowly for them both and it seems like they are always waiting.

I wrote in a blog a few days ago that we should always challenge our long held beliefs to see if they still hold true for us, to see if they are still serving us or we only them. People of faith find challenging beliefs to be sacrilegious or apostasy, but that, to me, is just silly. Even the Apostle Paul, once called Saul, discarded beliefs that were no longer serving him. He once thought Christians were heretics to his childhood faith of Judaism and that they deserved to be rooted out and even stoned for their new found religion. He even held the coats of those who stone the first Christian martyr, Stephen. Paul after his conversion to Christianity wrote “When I was a child I spake as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Had Paul lived to be an old man instead of getting himself killed for his strong beliefs he might have changed is mind again. Indeed there is at least one recorded instance where he did. And that was regarding a young man named John Mark who had started out on a missionary journey with Paul and when the going got tough turned back. Paul had branded John Mark a quitter and had no use for him, but later wrote, “Send John Mark to me for I have use of him.”

It is our quick judgements of people and things and beliefs and assumptions based on them that we need to challenge or rethink the most. People and things are not always what they seem and even the things we believe most strongly can be found upon closer examination to no longer serve us while things and people we once had no use for we may indeed find useful.

Born again Christians are big on the word “repent” which literally means “about face” or “turn around.” I spent a great deal of my young life either in Junior ROTC or in the regular Army doing close order drill. One of the maneuver the drill instructors first taught us standing in place was how to do an about face then later while marching to do a “to the rear march.” Both of which maneuvers still come in handy over fifty years later. I somewhat jokingly tell people that we ought to keep our reverse gear well-greased because in this life we often have use of it.

You friend and fellow traveler.

David White