The odd tangents my mind takes… It’s a wonder that I have friends. But here it is and I pray I make sense in JESUS name.

You’re either being washed or crushed. You can’t be crushed until you’ve been washed. Then, the crushing transforms you for your next level.

Apostle Katrina Jefferson-Wallace
“It IS What It IS”

When I heard the message preached, I saw a sound above it—a quiet insistence that has been bugging me for months, maybe even a couple years now. I first caught a glimpse of this sound when Bishop White (presiding prelate of United Fellowship International Ministries) preached a message about living parallel lives. The image stuck with me, the sound of it indelible in my tablet of my heart. I couldn’t fully perceive it then, and even now, I struggle to attach words—with all their undertones and highlights hidden in the plain sight of their definitions—to an atmospheric disturbance designed to disrupt how we human.

Let me back into it.

When we talk about God, we like to place God in eternity while we live in time. This is inaccurate. Eternity in and of itself is time; it is our way of measuring the immeasurable amount of a resource limited to us in our physical form. The plainest and most understood meaning of eternity is infinite or unending time. It is how we describe life after death, the joy of heaven, the fear of hell.

Here’s the thing, though: God is NOT eternal.

God does not “live” inside time as we do, nor does God experience time as we think about it. God created the time we document and live by, it’s formation documented in the 14th verse of Genesis 1:

“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:”

Genesis‬ ‭1:14‬ ‭KJV‬‬

And even then? Time is only relative to your experience of it. Waiting for a class to end feels like forever while hanging with your best friend seems like mere seconds.

Based on the theory of relativity, time, time is always shifting because we measure it based on gravitational pull (I’m realllllly oversimplifying). As simply as I can get it: the earth is constantly moving and changing position based on the strength (or loss thereof) of the sun and the moon and the planets we go around with. Add to that this idea that the galaxy itself is not “still” how we define stillness and BOOM! Time is relative to your position and experience.

But I didn’t come here to be super nerdy though. Let me get back to the Lord. Here’s a quote that really rocked me, made me sit back and consider the GREAT and TERRIBLE GOD who encompasses all of time and space:

Time is relative even for the human body, which is in essence a biological clock. The effect of time slowing down is negligible at speeds of everyday life, but it becomes very pronounced at speeds approaching that of light.

American Natural History Museum,
“A Matter of Time”

Time slowing down becomes very pronounced when you approach the speed of light.

Light.

God is called the Father of Lights (James 1:17).

I could get real scholarly right there but what I want you to walk away with is this:

When you approach God? The closer you get to Him, the slower time becomes. In fact it stops.

Let me explain. Because God created the heavens and the earth in which time rests (both our physical and the eternal sense of time), God sit above it, encompasses it. He envelopes it all. There is no MOVEMENT of time because God simply is. There is no origin story. He was not born or created. He simply exists and we live inside His existence, locked into the rhythm of time created for our benefit. Understand that without time we would be locked into eternal damnation automatically because we would be eternal—there would be no death and therefore no redemption.

Instead of leaving us to truly die in our sin nature—to face the written judgment designed for Lucifer and the fallen ones? God locked our physical selves into the prison of time. The mortal body would die, but with its death would come a chance at eternal life restored to God through Christ Jesus.

My God bad, you hear me?

Meanwhile. The benefit doesn’t stop there. We are told to come”boldly before the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16) and that God promises to restore the years lost to our mishaps, mistakes, misfortunes, and sin nature (Joel 2:24-26). What does it mean?

Well, to approach God is to approach the source of light, where time ceases to exist. Wherever God is, it just is—which means there is no past or present or future. It just IS. Things aren’t going to happen; they happen, they have happened and are waiting for the conditions for manifestation in Christ. His will isn’t going to be done; it’s done. Now. God exists everywhere in all things and in all seasons. He is there in what feels like your past at the same time that He rests in what you think is your future. He is; and the closer you get to God? So are you.