My parents called it the rat race.
Every generation groans, “What’s this world coming too?” Legend has it, pupils overheard Socrates mutter it. Technology drives us endlessly teetering on a learning curve and only the young survive. I remember when the cell phone evolved from a luxury to a need overnight, I took the hard stance that I would take it with me in the car only for emergencies. Now, we no longer have a land line, and my husband’s been known to text me for toilet paper from within the house.
History is an excellent teacher of our present reality. The facts prove the turn of the 20th Century beats this century by a landslide. The industrial and invention age made people’s heads spin, some even committed suicide under the stress of change. The young with their energy and zeal pushed relentlessly to manufacture and invent at lightning speed. Electric lighting terrified women. Theodore Roosevelt dug in his heels when his family pleaded with him to install the new fangled contraption called the telephone in their home. His Cabinet finally persuaded him to install one in the White House, but his family still had to send a “pony and a boy” to call him home for supper.
Ecclesiastes tells us what the world is all about. That the world with all of its changes goes around and around like a hamster on a wheel. Never-ending change makes us earthy because we have to survive. So, how to practice, “In the world and not of it?” One day out of complete frustration trying to install an app on my phone, I prayed and asked God to stop the world and let me get off. I imagined the world coming to a halt and standing still, but I didn’t get off. Instead, I let heaven in.
No amount of saying no or planning and organizing my day, could relieve me of all I had to do and the constant feeling of falling behind. For the first time in my Christian walk I realized that it was not something we do that makes us of the world, but it’s a state of mind wherein the heart lies. I had to take the next step and stare the world in the face and tell it to go ahead and go around without me.
God has placed eternity into our hearts. No wonder we long and desire more time. We’re wired to live forever. My heart was still of the world’s endless, redundant, ever changing chaos. Eternity is forever, confident and serene, a straight beautiful forever that never ends.
Now, I have all the time in the world. Maybe that’s what “heaven on earth,” really means.
“I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.” -Faulkner