No one ever chooses to stand outside of Time. It’s only in moments of tremendous grief or personal upheaval that time itself serves an abrupt eviction. And you get left behind, though you know it not. The rest of the world keeps spinning, that’s for sure. But from your new myopic island of timelessness, it doesn’t matter.  All that’s there is the wreckage of expectations that leave you wandering around like a scavenger searching for fragments of normal.  But they are few and far between on this island. It’s not a habitat that sustains life for very long… there will be damage to vital forces seen or unseen for the rest of your life.

And what is most bewildering is the forgetting that happens. Faces you know and love may come to visit. They will offer an embrace, a breaking of the bread and a companion in the search for artifacts of consolation.  But the faces know what the native can’t seem to remember: life goes on. Elsewhere. Inside the proper laws of time and space and a reasonable continuum of normal.  A place where babies are born, brides are kissed and dogs are played with at the park. So a choice has to be made. Build a bridge to this Elsewhere. Or stay longer and continue to water seeds of bitterness that can never bear fruit. Keep trying to warm the dead body with a torn up blanket or take the blanket to a friend and have her help you stitch it back together.

Time won’t wait. And he won’t promise to never toss you out again. He is cruel. But there is a way to beat him. At least, I hear it’s so.  Bury down deep, into the beating, bleeding heart of the One who beat time at his own game. And time will roll over you, high above searching for his victim, thrashing and gnashing about, like a storm inciting the ocean to a boil.  But beneath the waves,  inside The Heart, you can’t get tossed.  Time will call your number but the Heart has already called you by name.