Friday, October 5, 2007

Tourists in Time

Mary Lynn and I are planning to travel to the Grand Canyon soon. It is pleasant to be a tourist in mid-October.

I have a friend who will travel with us who seems to fear that someone might fall into the canyon. I guess that's a possibility. It has happened.

But I have to admit that I get a stronger sense of sheer vertigo from thinking not about the depths of the canyon, but about the sheer age. Our universe is about 10 billion years old. The earth itself is roughly 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few hundred million years one way or the other. If you go the Grand Canyon; some of the rock you see in places in the deepest parts is two billion years old.

I cannot fathom this. How does one measure the rock of ages?

I did some rough mental calculations, then turned to the web. If I live to be about 70 years old, I will have lived around two billion seconds , one second for every year of that ancient rock, or one-half second for every year the earth has been around, or one-quarter second for every year of the universe. My life-span is such a small sub-portion of a percent of the age of the earth that there is no point in even talking about it. I am birthed, raised, matured, withered and gone like one of those fragments of a second.

So we go to the Grand Canyon as tourists looking into the depths of time. We come to the edge of "the depths of the earth" which themselves merely rest in the the divine hand (Psalm 95:4). All time and all manner of things rest in the divine hand.