~ Running to a Clockwork World

Timing is everything in our focused world. a friend of mine just hinted that, if her parents were coming to a special event of hers, she would need to be prepared to accommodate them. To which she was told that all that would be needed was to have the room ready needed or not.

This is the way that we organize our lives, we will try to the utmost of our ability to keep a meeting time, or appointment, and if we are even five minutes late we will usually be contrite in our apology, even if the lateness is beyond our control.

This is a world that has lost, abandoned, any flexibility for personal or crisis intervention. Even now as I have been writing this a friend called up online.  Rather than give the time that might have been needed to discuss the project directly, I begged off until after my blog deadline, sorry K I did keep your comment though.

Historian Geoffrey Blainey once wrote a book on Australian History called “The Tyranny of Distance.” I suggest that we now live in a society that is ruled by, among other things, the Tyranny of Timing. it really doesn’t matter if there are extenuating circumstances in our lives, we are measured by the promptness by which we do what we said we would.

Look at the technology that we have available to us today. Mobile phones are a blessing, in that they enable us to readdress some of the imbalance imposed by the Tyranny of Timing. When a human need crops up in our lives whether it be of our making, or another’s, we are able to “reschedule” or make other arrangements. Admittedly the obverse of the coin is also true that the mobile seems to have the uncanny knack of tracking us down at the most inappropriate times, unless we learn to control it.

In just the same way as we must control the mobile, so it is that we must learn to control the tyranny of time. Otherwise we stand the very real possibility of time affecting our health through stress and related diseases.

Followers of Jesus have a deeper reason for taking back the freedoms that the tyranny of time tries to rob us of. The Gospels have many accounts of Jesus turning to the side when those around Him seemed to think He was being, to put it in a modern idiom, “weird”. The woman with the issue of blood, whose greatest hope was that she might touch His hem so that she might be healed, is a good example of this. Logically the disciples were right, He would have been in the middle of a mob with people brushing Him on all sides, but He felt this was different and it was.

Today we as His followers need the same empathy to counter the demands of the tyranny of time. We must differentiate between people need and clock demands. After all the Master came to: “tell the good news to the poor. ...    to announce freedom for prisoners, ...  to give sight to the blind, ...  to free everyone who suffers,” (Luke 4:16-18) and to proclaim “This is the year the Lord has chosen. "
He calls us to do likewise, so that we may proclaim “Jesus is Lord” and offer a personal introduction; I somehow doubt the tyranny of time fits there.