My Times Are in Thy Hand

He has looked at the clock on the wall roughly every ninety seconds for nine hours, and he could not now tell you what time it is without looking again.

That is the strange thing that happens in a corridor. Not that time goes slowly. That it stops doing its job.

Ordinarily his hours have edges. Something at nine, something else at eleven, lunch, a thing at two, home. The day is a set of containers and each one holds an activity, and the containers are what make a day feel like a day.

Today there are no containers. There is one enormous undifferentiated stretch, from twenty past seven this morning until whenever, and nothing inside it has any relationship to anything else. He has eaten one thing and could not say when. He rang somebody and cannot remember whether that was two hours ago or five.

And underneath the disorientation there is a quieter thing that has been bothering him since the middle of the afternoon: this day is not being counted by anybody. It is not in a diary. Nothing is being achieved in it. It is nine hours of his life that will leave no trace at all, and when it is over there will be no record that he spent it.

That is your corridor. That is your clock. And I want to speak to that, because there is a half-verse that puts the whole thing somewhere.

Whose hours these are

David is in a stretch where nothing is scheduled and nothing is under his control, and he says a short thing that has held people ever since.

But I trusted in thee, O Lord: I said, Thou art my God. My times are in thy hand.Psalm 31:15

My times are in thy hand.

Not my life in general. My times: the plural, the hours, the stretches, the specific pieces of a day. The word carries the sense of appointed periods, seasons, the segments a life is actually made of.

And they are in a hand. Held. Not floating loose in a corridor with nobody keeping track of them.

You have hours that are being held today. Not lost, not unaccounted for. The written word puts the pieces of your day into God's hand rather than into a vacuum, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man who has stopped being able to say what time it is.

Now let me name what has actually gone wrong with your day, because it is not spiritual and it will help to have it named.

A human being organizes time by events, not by clocks. Take away the events and the clock becomes useless, which is why nine hours in one seat feels like a substance rather than a sequence. Every long distance driver, every night watchman and every soldier knows this. It is not a sign that you are coming apart.

You are not disintegrating, you are undivided. The written word never makes the shape of a day the measure of a man. The Holy Spirit has not needed your hours to have edges in order to be in them.

And the thing that has been bothering you since the afternoon: that this day leaves no trace.

It leaves no trace with the world. Nothing will be filed. Nobody will thank you for nine hours in a plastic chair, and if you tried to describe them tomorrow you would run out of things to say in a sentence and a half.

You have a day that is on record where it matters. My times are in thy hand, and a thing in a hand is a thing being kept. The Holy Spirit has been holding today since twenty past seven this morning, including the hours you cannot now account for.