You’re always moving.
No really, you are. Stay as still as you can, freeze every muscle you can possibly control, and there you will be speeding along at the breakneck pace of sixty seconds per minute. Sixty minutes per hour. All the time, every day. There are no brakes, no pit stops, no time-outs. Time has the cruise control jammed wide open, and her highway only ends at the Styx.
Then it gets worse. While you are holding that frozen pose, the earth is whirling you about in a violent circle. For most of you Americans, you’re doing the merry-go round at about 600 miles per hour. On top of that, you’re being slingshotted about the sun at the truly cosmic speed of 1.6 million miles per day (that’s about 66,627 mph, for the NASCAR buffs). It’s enough to make the queasy among us want to hurl.
And in every single bit of that time and space, you are either being more or less like God. No neutral ground, no unimportant moments. An idle remark to a stranger can change their life. A chance glance downward can lead to a car wreck. A sleepy word to your wife over a coffee cup can impact for years. And if even the stuff you say in boredom matters, if even the mood you read cereal boxes and tin can nutritional labels (that’s not just me, right?) matters, then everything matters.
Some people have the idea that there are things that are truly trivial. Things that don’t matter and will never matter. “So you’re saying,” they laugh, “that it matters when I take a bite of cracker, or lose a hair? Grow up! Get a life!”
They glance at their own stopped watch and blissfully assume time has stopped as well. No one is traveling. We’re at a rest stop. We can get back on the road when we feel like it, after the cracker box is empty.
Tick tock.
You’re always traveling—through time if nothing else. And if you are traveling every second, then which way you are facing matters. Imagine someone who was cursed by one of those witches straight out of the Brothers Grimm (wart and all); cursed to never, ever stop walking forwards, for the rest of his life. Which way he was facing would suddenly take on life-and-death proportions, wouldn’t it? That’s rather like how we move through time—perpetual motion machines whether we like it or not.
But as we said, it gets worse. Let’s leave time for a moment (or at least pretend that we can). What about space? What does that bring to mind? Star Trek? The “final frontier”? We like to think of space as mostly cold, boring emptiness, with an occasional ball of gas (some of which are, oddly, perpetually on fire) and the random rock. That’s pretty much what infinity means to us—long stretches of boring with an occasional interesting bit. It sounds a lot like the modern God, which explains why we so casually call God “infinite.” He’s long stretches of weird with the occasional understandable bit (Sunday-school Jesus, mostly) catching attention like a passing comet. No wonder your average evangelical doesn’t do much theology anymore.
Now, of course God is “infinite” as far as that word goes; but it has a few dangerous connotations. You see, no one can progress in infinity. Like it or not, you can’t ever get to... the end. Or anywhere, really. No matter what you do, you have only moved an unmeasurable speck an immeasurable distance from any other unmeasurable speck. When you’re moving in infinity, there’s nowhere to go and no way to tell if you are going. There’s always just as much infinity on every side of you as there was before.
But God is not the Great Directionless. He has a center from which all the other infinities radiate outward, like light from a lighthouse. Once you can see that, it always lets you know which way you’re going. The medievals, in many ways, had a better picture of space than we do. For them, space was spherical, with a center and edge and an End. It had coordinates. If you could somehow travel far enough, fast enough, you could reach the point that made everything else work, the Prime Meridian of Existence. Beyond that was everything Else. Traditionally, we call it Triune Love, in a laughable attempt to describe what is going on in there. (God didn’t really give us big enough words yet, but we are told to use the ones we have. Superabundance can afford the abject poverty of three syllables.) It gives us something to measure to and from; a solitary signpost amidst the ocean of His Goodness, His gushing vats of Time, His tabletop full of galaxies.
Short version: you know where you are because He told you.
If He didn’t tell us—or if He mumbled, or shifts His center of gravity occasionally, or just was never There to begin with—the temptation is to believe that how you are moving doesn’t matter, since there was nowhere to go and no way to tell. We are all just swimming around in the Infinite, and you like it over there in the microscopic pantheist bit, and I’m over here in the microscopic Presbyterian dust mote, and maybe we’ll switch places in a few eternities and try out each other’s couches or philosophies. Whatever.
But if God is the Prime Mover, the origin and source of all things (and He is) and you’re always moving (and you are); then you are either facing towards him, or away from him. There are no other options. Human beings are the straight lines in the circle of eternity, and we’re always moving closer to the Center...or the edge. Where there is as little God as possible.
Eat a Cheeto. Which way are you facing?
Smile at a loved one. Which way are you going?
Watch a baseball sail through the air. Which way are you moving?
Watch your friend enjoy something you desperately want.
Tick tock.
A wise man I knew overheard an objection when he proclaimed that the only two choices in life are obedience to God, or disobedience. “What about sleep?” a scoffer snorted.
He just smiled. “Well, you either should be, or you shouldn’t be!”
Remember, three-hundred-sixty seconds per hour, all day, all night. God gave us a map, a signpost, and a Guide. Which way are we going?
