My my, does time ever fly by. Looking at my calendar, I am amazed to find that it has already been two full months since I have finished this past school-year & three full months since I have started my job as a full-time line cook at an upper-tier restaurant in the world's largest shopping complex. In 5 weeks, I’ll be heading into the nether regions of the Rocky Mountains for 20 days as a counsellor at one of the Bible camps my church has ties with. It has been over a year since I started logging, and it will be less than a year until I graduate with an undergraduate double-major degree.
Wow.
Don't you remember those days when you were a wee lad (or lass, if you're of that genetic disposition), and when those 75-minute made-for-children movies seemed to stretch on for eternity—much less a full day. Or how about summer vacations? Remember how those things seemed to be as long as the time spent in class? And those vacations were only two months! I'm more that halfway through my summer break before my penultimate undergraduate term begins in September, and believe you me: it hasn't felt like two months at all.
I once was told a theory about the perception of temporal relativity—aka why time seems to "feel" longer or shorter depending on what you're doing &/or how old you are. I'm not completely sure where I heard it, but if my failing memory (in my pre-geriatric years) still serves me with any faithfulness, I believe that I learned the theory in my Advanced Perception class this past term. Anyways, the theory states that the reason why long periods of time seem to progress a lot faster the older you get is due to the amount of time you have previously experienced. When a 5-year-old adds another year to his life, he has increased his total experience of time by 20%, whereas when a 25-year-old adds the same year to his life, it only chalks up another 4% of total experienced time. Relatively speaking, a 5-year-old's experience of a year would be equivalent to a 25-year-old's experience of 5 years. Relative perception of time is crazy. No wonder a day is like a thousand years to God & a thousand years like a day. Poor Methuselah... His last year of life would have felt as long as these past two months of mine. Man, that's fast!
I think sometime soon, I will write/e-publish my documentation of the Mexico Spring break trip that I & a handful of my friends took at the end of February. It was good times. Travelling 5,000 kilometres to get a couple hundred bottles of pop, among other things. Nonetheless, there is many a story to tell from that trip. Many a story indeed.
A month ago, I was reading about how chemists have discovered a new method of combining atoms to form new compounds, which have the same physical properties of compounds that are created from other elements. The process is amazing & profound, as it pretty much adds a third dimension to today's conventional periodic table of elements. The even cooler thing is that chemists now have the ability to do what alchemists always dreamed of doing: They can turn lead into gold...or at least they can turn lead into what looks, feels, acts & reacts like (and therefore is essentially) gold. The chemical process has been wittily dubbed "jellium" since how it works basically involves individual atoms of the same element globbing together in little jello-like clusters to form super-atoms. It's pretty neat, and of course—like all things that I think about—it reminds me of Christianity & the Church.
Every individual in the Church has been chosen by God for a specific purpose. All of us by ourselves have been given gifts by which we can glorify the Lord & can spread love and kindness to our hurting world. The amazing part, however, is that when we decide to shed our protective outer layers & become vulnerable enough to let others in the Church close enough to form a productive, healthy & proactive bond, the community that results can become & can act to accomplish anything: nothing is impossible for a community that is bound together with the true love of Christ. The problem is that the members of the Church—like the individual atoms—have to get close enough in order to create a super-atom structure. The warning there, however, is that there is a tendency for atoms (super, or normal) to try to fill their energy levels & become stable and non-reactive, unable to make any change in the world.
Think about this. Let us learn the lesson from chemistry. Community & individuality are both excellent things; just don't fill up your life with things so as to become non-reactive: leave enough room to change the world around you. The implications are explosive.
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