Two Clocks
1 Corinthians 7:29-30 - "This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods..."
A few months ago, Laura and I finally introduced our daughters to Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. Even though we had to hit pause a bunch of times to attempt explanations, they loved the movie. But there’s one stretch I find almost too painful to watch. The crew lands on a water planet orbiting close to a massive black hole, where gravity does something terrible to the clock: every hour on the surface costs seven years back on Earth. A mission lasting only a little over three hours for them costs more than twenty-three years aboard the ship and back on Earth.
Cooper returns to the ship and watches two decades of his children’s recorded messages in a single sitting. His son ages from a teenager into a husband and father. Cooper watches him celebrate a child’s birth and then grieve that child’s death. A life Cooper should have shared unfolds on a screen while he can do nothing but watch. I sat on our couch with my girls beside me and felt the whole weight of it: he lost their childhoods. I can hardly imagine a heavier loss.
The scene runs on two clocks. One ticked on the planet's surface, counting minutes. The other ticked back on Earth, turning those same minutes into years, and Cooper knew it. We live inside an similar arrangement. One clock hangs on the kitchen wall and runs our days: school years, work weeks, birthdays, bedtimes. The other is God's clock, counting down to the return of Christ and the start of forever. Most of us only hear the first one. Paul writes like a man who hears both.
"The appointed time has grown very short," he says. His verb means that the time has been contracted, drawn together, compressed. Some have pictured it as a ship shortening its sails as the harbor approaches. The journey isn’t over, but the horizon has changed, and everything aboard must now be handled in light of how near the destination has come.
Then Paul settles into the strangest cadence in the chapter: Those who are married, as though not. Those who mourn, as though not. Those who rejoice, as though not. Those who buy, as though owning nothing. Paul isn’t telling husbands to neglect their wives, grieving people to stop weeping, or joyful people to become numb. He’s telling us that none of these present realities gets to be the only clock we watch.
When we know the second clock is running, everything on the first clock changes weight. Grief stays fully real, but Paul won’t let it be final. Which is why he can call our heaviest seasons a “light momentary affliction,” because he’s weighed them against “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17). Joy changes weight too. We can love a marriage, a home, and a good season, all without gripping them. Because a greater wedding is already on the calendar! Even money loosens in the hand once we glimpse the exchange rate between the clocks. Hope re-weighs the world.
The Corinthians needed this word for the same reasons we do. Nothing in their city taught anyone to hold things loosely, and nothing in ours does either. Grip tighter, buy more, and when loss comes anyway, it hands us grief without hope. Only a risen Lord can teach a heart to love something fully and hold it loosely at the same time. Paul hands the second clock to ordinary believers with mortgages and gravesides and wedding rings, because that is exactly where it does its work.
I felt all of this on the couch that night. Watching Cooper lose his children's childhoods touched the nerve every parent carries. Our girls are growing at the normal speed, and the normal speed is still too fast. Time takes every childhood, one bedtime at a time. The second clock is the only comfort I know that holds. In Christ, time stops being a thief! Every hour is carrying us toward more, and nothing loved in Him will finally be lost.
This is where the beauty of the gospel shines. Jesus walked out of a tomb into time that never runs out, and He carried our future with Him. Because He lives, the people of God keep time differently than the world can. We become the strange ones at the funeral whose grief has a horizon. The ones at the closing table whose deed has a shelf life and whose inheritance does not. The ones who feel the days shortening and find, underneath the ache, something gathering that sounds almost like music before a wedding. The Groom has already risen. The Father has already set the date.
Today: Take two minutes, with your palms open on your knees. Hold this week's heaviest thing and its sweetest thing before God, and tell Him that both belong to His clock that never runs out.
Prayer: “Father, You created our days. You stand outside of time and stepped into ours to rescue us. I acknowledge that every clock I own will stop, but You will not. Teach me to number my days with a heart filled with Your perspective and Your priorities. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK