Different Views Of ...

Different Views of Time

You may not realize it, but your appreciation of time this morning goes well beyond the challenges of adjusting to daylight-savings time.

There was a time when time was a relatively simple thing. People were born, grew up, grew old and died. Days, seasons and years past. Then along came Newton and told us there was nothing in the laws of the universe that forced time to march forward. And Einstein developed this further with the idea that time could be stretched or shrunk, depending on how you looked at it. Now physicists are looking at the nature of time itself.

Dr. Paul Wesson, from the University of Waterloo thinks our whole notion of time may be wrong. He’s looked at Einstein’s equations, and thinks time is just an illusion we create to make sense of the universe. He says that all the events in the universe are all occurring at the same time, there’s no past, or future.

Dr. Lawrence Shulman, a professor of physics from Clarkson University in New York state has a different view of time. He does think it’s flowing forwards, with small pockets of backwards time existing within our universe. He’s done the calculations and found that backward and forward time can exist side by side.

Finally, Dr. Ronald Mallet, a physicist at the University of Connecticut also thinks time can flow backwards. He’s in the process of designing a time machine, using light to twist time. (Taken from CBC radio: Quirks & Quarks. September 8th 2001.”It’s About Time!”) (http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/01-02/sep0801.htm)

The Apostle Paul in Ephesians 5:16 explained how we should understand and use time. In Ephesians he presented to the Christians there how they should regard one another in various forms of love. One of the most loving things we can do for another person is to give them our time in considerate ministry. Time is the one resource that we all have to give.

From a sermon by Matthew Kratz, Give Time, 11/2/2009