Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
“How poor are those who have no patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” –Shakespeare
One of the most enduring proverbs in the popular mind is “time heals all wounds”. The problem with this idea is that time is not the primary agent in healing. If that were true there would be no bitter old people and unfortunately quite a few such individuals do exist in the world. In truth it is the grace of God, whether it is the common type given to all human beings or the sanctifying kind given only to His children, which is the agent that binds up emotional wounds. That God most often cures our ills over time is, to some degree, incidental.
However, even when so qualified, healing most often does take time.
No doubt God can and sometimes does heal in a moment. As an omnipotent Being it stands to reason that he must have this ability. If He so willed all resolution of our problems, large and small, could be accomplished by Him instantaneously. However common human experience teaches that this is rarely the case. To our frequent frustration God uses time, sometimes long periods of time, in His healing of our souls.
The obvious reason for this is that He wishes to teach us the virtue of patience. Few particularly want to hear this. Learning patience is one of the harder tasks of the spiritual life, particularly in a day and age when instant gratification is incessantly advertised as our right. We also have trouble figuring out why God so values time when He Himself is not ultimately subject to sequential existence, but the Author of it. Why, we ask, should anything have to wait if He, as Master of time, can simply abrogate it?
There is mystery here. We cannot completely answer the question of why grass can grow in a week, while a Giant Redwood takes hundreds of years. Both grass and Redwood are created by the same God; but the solidity of the tree, its beauty and majesty is obviously not comparable to a blade of grass. Neither is its worth. The worth of things is often connected with time in God’s economy of creation and, for that matter, re-creation. The redemption of Humankind is no exception.
Beyond this the development of patience is simply the way that we bring our fallen and thus imperfect view of time into harmony with God’s view. It is probably safe to say that in their innocence Adam and Eve had no need to learn patience because their perception of time was the same as their Creator’s. It is only the curse of the father and mother of our race which has made us hate waiting for anything. Our first parents may well have had no sense of frustration in waiting because time had not become associated with scarcity. Scarcity of time only means something to creatures that face death and death had not yet visited God’s finest creation.
So time does not heal all wounds, but time does have a role to play in that healing. This is its place in the lives of a redeemed people who have yet to experience their full and final liberation in eternity by Jesus Christ. If it seems imperfect that is a residue of our fallenness and its resulting distortion of God’s purposes.
But that purpose will be made known to us in God’s time, when all things are summed up in our Lord….and time itself ceases to be.