John 8:58
Young parents typically rejoice when their children learn new phrases.
"Honey, little Bobby just said bye-bye!"
"Mom, you'll never believe what your granddaughter just did. She counted to five."
Or, "Ernie, tell your uncle what the bird says."
We applaud such moments. I did too.
With one exception.
One phrase my daughter learned gave me pause. Jenna was nearly or barely two years of age, just learning to speak well. With her little hand lost in my big one, we walked through the lobby of our apartment building. Suddenly she stopped. Spotting a ball, she looked up at me and requested, "Just a moment." Sliding her hand from mine, she walked away.
Advertisement
A moment? Who told her about "moments"? To date, her existence had been time-free. Toddlers know no beginning or end or hurry or slow or late or soon. The small world of a child is huge in the present and small in the future and past. But Jenna's phrase, "Just a moment," announced that time had entered her world.
In his autobiography, The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner divides his life into three parts: "Once below a time," "Once above a time," and "Beyond time." The childhood years, he says, are lived "once below a time . . . What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless?" 1
Is childhood for us what life in the garden was like for Adam and Eve? Before the couple swallowed the line of Satan and the fruit of the tree, no one printed calendars or wore watches or needed cemeteries. The world was time-free. Minutes passed equally unmeasured in Jenna's two-year-old world. No thought of life being anything different than daily walks and naps and music and Mom and Dad. But "just a moment" belied the intrusion of pirates on her innocent island. Time had invaded her world.
Life, she was discovering, was a cache of moments: measurable and countable increments, like change in a pocket or buttons in a can. Your pocket may be full of decades, my pocket may be down to a few years, but everyone has a certain number of moments.
Everyone, that is, except God. As we list the mind-stretching claims of Christ, include this one near the top. "Before Abraham was born, I AM" (Jn. 8:58). If the mob didn't want to kill Jesus before that sentence, they did afterwards. Jesus claimed to be God, the Eternal Being. He identified himself as "the High and Lofty One who dwells in eternity" (Isa. 57:15 NKJV).