Time and God's Calendar
A Sacred Chain story
It’s been a lazy day today. In my part of the world, the outside temperature never made it above zero (Fahrenheit!), so my good wife and I hunkered down inside with bright sunshine pouring through the windows and lots of sports on the TV (I count myself blessed that she likes watching sports as much as I do, and I’d bet she knows more sports trivia than most of my guy friends!).
I wasn’t intending to write another of these posts for a few days, but I’m not doing much of anything else while sitting on the couch and casually paying attention to the Australian Open, Tottenham soccer, and the NFL playoffs. I finished the Sunday crossword and all the other word games on the NYT app, so how about I tell you about the second challenge in my book?
It is all about time. The challenge of the first part was the Bible. Once you realize that the ancient human authors of Scripture weren’t doing science and that God wasn’t trying to smuggle modern science into the text, I was no longer troubled by passages that seem to suggest the world was created in six days or is only six thousand years old. But there is a different challenge for people of faith that comes from the science of evolution and the billions of years that go with that.
Our minds aren’t particularly well suited to comprehending that kind of time, so I decided to compress the history of the universe into a week. I’ve seen others do this into a year or even a day, but I decided to use the timeframe of a week to correspond to the creation story in Genesis 1, and so that we can talk about God’s weekly planner.
Sloan’s drawing for this chapter has a Far Side vibe with God sitting at his desk filling out his weekly planner. This was the original sketch. The editor at Harper asked that Sloan change God’s poofy cloud slippers into sandals. Sloan did this, but wasn’t entirely happy about it, so I give you the original here in all its artistic integrity.
The point of the weekly planner is to see God’s creative activities on the timescale of a week. And the challenge of this comes from the principle found in all the leadership books that if you want to see someone’s true priorities, look at their calendar. What do you we find when we look at God’s weekly calendar?
Compressing the 13.8 billion years of the universe’s history into a week means that the creation of the universe occurred at midnight on Sunday. The our galaxy, the Milky Way, came into existence at 9:36AM on Monday morning. Then it seems that God wasn’t up to much until Thursday afternoon, when our sun was formed. And Earth came along just 22 minutes later. The first presence of single-celled life would be during the 11 o’clock hour Thursday night, but no multi-cellular life was created until Saturday morning. The dinosaurs roamed Earth from 11:12-11:23PM on Saturday. And our species, Homo sapiens, didn’t appear (on the most generous interpretation) until 11:59 and 47 seconds — just 13 seconds before the end of the week.
What does it say about God’s priorities that we occupy such a minuscule part of the history of the universe? About all that was happening for the billions of years from Monday to Thursday on God’s calendar was that heavy elements were being formed in stars and being spewed out in supernovas. It kinda seems like God was just sitting on his sofa watching it happen? Does that mean God cares more about creating carbon and oxygen than about creating humans? No, I don’t think that necessarily follows. But it might mean that God really likes creating other stuff too and isn’t particularly worried about how long it takes.
I’ll tease some more of the implications out of this in future posts. But in an attempt to be more god-like myself, I’m going back to the sofa and watching sports.