All The Days of My Life in a Single Moment: Guest Post by Tim Fall

A couple months ago Tim Fall posted this piece on his blog, Just One Train Wreck After Another. I loved it so much, I asked him if I could re-post it here along with a few of my Classical Quest pictures.  I'm grateful to Tim for allowing me to share it with you today! Enjoy!

Ian McLeod loves his son Cory. There’s nothing unusual about that. But he showed that love by taking a picture of him every day of his life for 21 years. Every single day. For 21 years. And then he created a video of what his son looked like from Day One on.

It’s fun, in an unnerving sort of way, to see Cory grow up before our eyes in mere moments. Yet it also opened my eyes to understand better how God sees me. Every day of my life is constantly before God in eternity. It’s as if he is always seeing them all in a single moment, but not really because that puts eternity in the language of lapsing time; I think God experiences these things differently than do we who experience life merely sequentially, a series of events one after the other without the ability to return to any moment passed.

C.S. Lewis describes it this way in Mere Christianity:

Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty – and every other moment from the beginning of the world – is always the Present for him.

If Lewis is right about prayer and eternity, then it stands that it applies to our entire lives and God’s ability to see us in eternity. He doesn’t see us in a fast-moving sequence from birth on, like Ian shows us his son in the video; God sees us in all moments all the time (there’s that troublesome word time again).

What really gets me excited as I write this is realizing that God loves me more than I can imagine and therefore actually enjoys seeing all my moments in that eternal-always. I’m excited about that not only because of the love I’ve experienced from God, but because of the love he has allowed me to experience for my own children.

I don’t think I could handle experiencing all the moments of my children’s life at the same time. I don’t think I can handle experiencing even just the wonderful moments I’ve had with them (and I admit some of the non-wonderful moments are much more my fault than theirs). I think it would overwhelm me to experience the love I have for them all at once, with no sequence, no shifting from one experience to another with something else in between.

But God can handle this, of course, because:

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. (1 John 4:16.)

And that’s how it is, now and for all eternity.

Tim Fall is a California native who changed his major three times, colleges four times and took six years to get a Bachelor’s degree in a subject he’s never been called on to use professionally. Married for over 25 years with two kids, his family is constant evidence of God’s abundant blessings in his life. Tim blogs here.