TAUG: Time, Spring 2020

!"#$ To An Unknown God: A Journal of Christian Thought At UC Berkeley

TIME

Volume 13 | Issue 1 | Spring 2020

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Letter From the Editor

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Masthead

6 When?

Syndney Booth

8 In Light of Eternity Emily Kinnaman

10 Death of Time Patricia Tse

11 One Second to Live Noah Woo

14 Berkeleytime Joseph Rodriguez

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18 Does Eternity Destroy Meaning?

Charles Yang

20 On Stewarding

Time

Kara Anderson

22 An Interview

with W. Thomas Boyce

24 Dearest Friend Justin Fung

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Art Credit

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Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, Time seems to undergird everything. At Cal, we have the hourly ring from the campanile reminding us that time is, indeed, passing, as we run to our classes, hoping to make it there by Berkeley time.

Our sense of time largely depends on structure, routine -- and on cramming as many things into as little time as possible. It would be difficult to find someone at Cal who wouldn’t ask for more time if it were offered to them: to study, to join just one more extracurricular, to spend time with friends.

We also live with the knowledge that our time is limited on a larger scale; inevitably, we will all die.

What does time mean then?

In this journal, we have collected essays and reflections that speak to both varieties of time: the time that we occupy now and the time that will be after our bodies no longer breathe and move.

Though the time scales are different, they are interconnected. Our understanding of our limited lifetimes, and our beliefs about what comes after, shapes the decisions that we make today.

When the members of TAUG first chose the theme of time, we did not know how the semester would unfold. We -- as a student body, and also the whole world -- have experienced a complete disruption in the rhythms and routines that give us a sense of time. As we reorient ourselves to a new world, we must also reframe our conceptions of time. The Christian view of time, which this journal seeks to explore, is one which is grounded in unchangeable promises made by an unwavering God. These promises -- of an eternal future with God -- were enacted, made possible, by the sacrifice of one man, who lived on earth for only a limited time. If God himself lived a human life, constrained by time, in Jesus Christ, there is something sacred about our own human lives; not just the eternal future that awaits us, but also the here and now.

And so I do not take it lightly that you have chosen to dedicate some of your own precious time to pick up, and perhaps even read, this journal. May you find it helpful, and may the timeless truths of a God who came to earth to live, to breathe, and to suffer as humans do give us a new sense of our place in time.

With hope,

Emily Kinnaman Editor-in-Chief

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“Therefore, the One whom you workship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you.”

–– Acts 17:23 Editor-in-Chief Emily Kinnaman

Social Media Chair Kara Anderson

Executive Editor Joseph Rodriguez Ben Chow

Associative Editors Charles Yang Jenny Woo Kara Anderson Kristin Yee Sydney Booth Michaela Wong

Executive Designer Jane Le Huynh Business Manager Daniel Park

Associate Designers David Chen Justin Fung Katherine Yuhan Lily Li Patricia Tse Associate Business Manager Dorcas Cheung Photographer Justin Fung

To An Unknown God is not affiliated with any church or any religious group. Opinions expressed in articles do not necessarily represent those of the editors. We are completely student-run and funded partly by the student body as an ASUC-sponsored student publication. Funding is also provided through individual donations. Distribution is free while supplies last. To contact us, please email us at taug@berkeley.edu. Visit us at unknowngodjournal.com.

*Not photographed: Jenny Woo, Sydney Booth, Michaela Wong, David Chen

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WORDS SYDNEY BOOTH

When ?

Growing up, my family would make occasional road trips to southern Colorado to visit my grandparents.

The drive is about five hours depending on road conditions. As a kid, it was torture. Cooped up in the back of the car with my younger brother had me asking my mom “Are we there yet?” every half hour.

A common response shot over her shoulder was always: “We get there when we get there.”

As human beings, one of our biggest questions we ask in life is “when?”, or “Are we there yet?” These questions have childish connotations, but I find myself asking them, or at least a different version of them, every single day. When will I make time to take this class? When will I finally be successful?

When am I going to hit all of the important life milestones everyone is striving to hit like getting married and having a family? When will I finally get to lead a cute, comfy life absent of all fear and insecurity?

The question of “when” in and of itself is a way of quantifying time in a way that is useful to us. Numbers on a clock don’t mean anything unless we have a deadline, and the boxes on a calendar aren’t useful without numbers in the top right corner. We build our lives around time, but we are powerless against it. We want to know when the sand in the hourglass will run out and we want to believe it won’t be before we get to achieve everything we want in life.

What we don’t find in scripture is a date.

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WORDS SYDNEY BOOTH

... we see that the important questions in life don’t start with “when.”

It seems like they begin with “how?”

What we don’t find in scripture is a date. Rather, we find a promise. Paul, writing to the church says in Phillipians 1:6, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” We know from other passages such as Matthew 24:36 that Jesus didn’t exactly circle a date on a calendar for his second coming--no one knows when that will happen. It’s along the same lines as the fact that none of us know exactly how many grains of sand we have left in the hourglass. What we do know is that Jesus Christ won’t leave us where we’re at. We can still accomplish so much for the kingdom despite the fact that time will remain an enigma to all of us during our short lives.

Certainly, though, there is merit in being aware of our time on this earth. Psalm 90:12 tells us to “number our days” and Ephesians 5:16 tells us to “make the most of every opportunity” during our short time on this earth. So where exactly is the line? How do we live in light of eternity while trusting that we don’t need to be bogged down by the question of “when” and the ever-ticking clock that is time itself?

I think Jesus answered this question best during the Sermon on the Mount. In it he states: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:33-34) To me, this verse is how our Savior reassures us that “we get there when we get there.” From this verse, we see that the important questions in life don’t start with “when.” It seems like they begin with “how?” How can we seek first his kingdom and his will for us?

Rather, we find a promise.

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LI E G R HT N O I F T Y AN

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Given the events of the last few months, we are perhaps more acutely aware than ever of one certainty of life: death. Many of us have been given the time to ponder and to wonder: what makes life worth living?

What are the most important things in life?

Most people would list things such as love, kindness, doing good, as things which give life meaning. Despite -- rather, because of -the world being turned upside down, these things shine through as the really important things in life.

But why do we care about justice, love, kindness, or goodness? Those things are of no benefit to us once we no longer are alive; indeed, a life committed to these values often requires great sacrifice of immediate personal wellbeing or satisfaction.

Further, what do all our efforts to improve the world amount to when, in 5 billion

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years or so, the sun will burn out and the earth will cease to sustain life? Though that’s a long time away, the fact of the world’s ultimate trajectory remains. And it doesn’t feel right that, in the end, all of our best efforts at creating justice, all of the love shared between human beings, will be swallowed up in darkness, the same as if they never happened at all.

Many believe that embracing reality -- being honest about life -- means quieting our instincts about what is natural and unnatural. Though death is one reliable fact at the end of every human being’s life, it never ceases to cause disruption and grief; it feels unnatural. We would like to imagine that there is something beyond our short lives, but that seemingly must be replaced with the uncomfortable reality that earth is all there is. God, and the possibility of meaning beyond ourselves, is portrayed as an idea which must be abandoned as one grows in maturity and understanding of the world.

But what if we didn’t dismiss our instincts as childish, but instead listened to them as guides to our most essential needs? Our biological feelings of hunger and thirst point to real needs that have an object which can directly and completely satisfy them. In the same way, Christians believe that our deep-rooted desires come from a creator God who designed human beings for a world different than the one that we

currently inhabit. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Thus, our desire to believe that humans occupy time beyond their 80-or-so years on earth reflects an essential truth: that human souls are immortal, designed to live with God forever. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, “Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” It is in this eternal future that we find the fulfillment of our desire for good things to last; justice, love, beauty, hope, and goodness all continue, and indeed are the final order.

If these good and right things represent the way the world is meant to be, what do we make of the state it is in now? In the Christian narrative of history, the world, which has been corrupted since the fall of humankind, continues to exist in brokenness; death, pain and suffering continue to plague humanity. To make matters even worse, we as humans have no ability to truly save the world. Many people today strive toward creating a better world, in some manner or another. These efforts to do good in the world are important, and part of the call on human beings to reflect the character of God, which is redemptive and creative.

But none of our human efforts are complete answers to the massively broken world that we live in; they can never bring about the full restoration we so deeply desire. For every issue that we solve, a new one arises.

We play a game of Whack-a-Mole as evil and suffering never go away, but instead reappear in new places.

The Christian view of history and of the future then offers an answer as to how we can reconcile the knowledge that we will die with our innate drive to live a worthwhile life. We can then view pursuing virtue and doing good then as a discipline in modeling God’s character and partnering with God in his work, rather than an effort to save ourselves. This relieves a large amount of pressure, so that we can be honest about the results of our work: even the greatest efforts often create only small changes. And yet, we don’t lose hope because our hope was never in our own efforts to begin with. Instead, we can place our hope in God, who isn’t constrained by time like humans are, and who can judge without human limitations. We can have real hope in a future where God “will wipe away every tear from [his people’s] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.”

Emily is a third-year biology major with a side interest in ancient history. She enjoys reading, running, and cooking elaborate meals.

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DEATH OF TIME Art Patricia Tse

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ONE SECOND TO LIVE Words Noah Woo

“Make a Google calendar.”

After several months of being pestered by friends who wanted to snoop around my daily schedule more than they genuinely desired that I live an organized life, I gave in. At first, I didn’t think much about the app. I would add in my course schedule for the semester and be content. But gradually, I began relying more and more on this electronic schedule, adding in my travel plans,

“the only unit of time that I could truly be confident in was the one second that I was living in” my hangouts, and even my weekly church services. And I continued actively using it, detailing my entire life in this one app. But why?

Because I felt peace and security in having my future laid out in an organized manner and in marching to the beat of the notifications from my phone.

And yet somewhere down this uniform and well-structured path, I ran into an obstacle that caused discord in my peaceful, repetitive life. I was struck

by what James writes to the church in James 4: 13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such

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Having been brought out of my thoroughly-scheduled life by the Word of God, I thought it reasonable that the same source would also hold the answer to how I should spend my time. under an omniscient, infinite God as a mortal, finite man, I found that the only unit of time that I could truly be confident in was the one second that I was living in.

God is a God who desires to be sought after 12

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How then should I live? Having been brought out of my thoroughly-scheduled life by the Word of God, I thought it reasonable that the same source would also hold the answer to how I should spend my time. In studying Jesus’ prayer to the Father, I found a fascinating statement: “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Jesus equated life to knowing God: in the process of searching for an answer, I had only found another mystery. Having deemed that there was no shortcut to what I was looking for around understanding this verse, I began focusing on what Jesus had said.

And later, in a moment of clarity, I found my answer in a Psalm: “You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, Lord, do I seek.’” This was the answer that I found: that God is a God who desires to be sought after, that He commands His people to seek His face, to seek the things on His heart, and to live in response to what we discover.

Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, builds upon the Psalmist’s verse and establishes this action of seeking God as the highest value: “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” This was what I found that I had to build everything in my life on top of, because Paul counted not half his life, but his entire life as loss for the value of knowing

Christ. This is the fulfillment of that one second that I have, to seek God and to find Him, because this is what Jesus revealed as life abundant, life fully-satisfied, and life forever. Why do the goals that we pursue, like relationships, financial success, and academics fail to fully and perpetually satisfy us? Paul implies here that we, as creation, are fully satisfied when we accept our Creator’s original design for us, which is to be intimately in a personal relationship with Him. This is easier said than done. Living out the life that Paul painted, one devoted to knowing Jesus more, is too hard. Were the odds against me in this fight? Had I been fighting wrongly?

Had I been fighting at all? Paul gives insight into “making the best use of time” in his letter to the church of Ephesus: “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.” In an entertainment-centered culture like our own, where we have access to no shortage of media to spend our hours on, it is not a difficult task to fill our time. The question that Paul answers is not whether we are spending our time or not, since we are always spending our time in some way; it is how meaningfully we are spending our time. And there is a way of spending our seconds that Paul goes as far as calling being “drunk with wine.” What is this lifestyle that Paul compares to those of drunkards? He reveals in the very same verse: it is a lifestyle that keeps you from being “filled with the Spirit.” As followers of Christ, we are called to delight in the law of the Lord, and to meditate on it day and night. But do we place meditating on God’s words as

And Should we grow weary of the struggles of this life, we are able to remind ourselves that we already know the end of the story for those marked by Christ.

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BERKELEYTIME WORDS JOSEPH RODRIGUEZ

Being on time nowadays is hard. But we ardently get drilled, sometimes even scolded, to do so—from our parents, from our teachers, and from our friends. Yet nothing seems to stick.

Perhaps this reflects something deeper about the kinds of humans we are, conditioned in the modern world to think that this universe should run according to our clock.

At Berkeley, we’re swimming in this water. Here, time does run on our clock. We’ve even coined a term for this: Berkeleytime. Running from class to class, Berkeleytime helps us; it saves those of us who have to make that uphill trek from Dwinelle to Pimentel. We’ve learned to rely on those precious ten minutes. Still, others of us have used those ten minutes liberally; ten minutes have slowly turned into eleven, twelve, and for our very lazy friends, thirteen. For those of us who fall into this latter camp, we think of time in an instrumental fashion. We think to ourselves, “Perhaps sleeping in ten more minutes will do the job. I mean, c’mon, it’s just ten minutes.” Soon those ten minutes creep into fifteen, then twenty, then thirty—a musical arrangement of alarms.

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Berkeleytime, as I’ve come to see it, trains us to think of time in a particular way. This training happens subtly, under the hood of our cognitive faculties. It shapes us and forms us into the types of beings who think that time ought to run according to how we want it to. It reflects something more fundamental about the way we think about the world.

We wear apple watches and countdown new years with extravagant spectacles. We dread Mondays and desperately await for the weekend to come. Summer seems so far away, yet here we are in class dreaming of where we’ll end up in five or ten years, picturing to ourselves a vision of the good life, where we’ll find romance, success, and happiness. “Ah yes, if only we could meet the right one,” we say to ourselves. “Ah yes, if only I had five more minutes, then I’d finish my project and call my parents.” We speak in conditionals, as if we are promised a tomorrow. But are we?

How have we come to think of time in this way? How does the way we talk about time structure the power it has on our lives? Philosophers have been attempting to answer such questions since humans started thinking. Some have failed, others have triumphed. Take German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for instance. Hegel argues history has a certain cadence to it. For Hegel, time moves forward. Consider his famous tagline, summarizing nearly the whole of the history of philosophy: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, derives its name from the Greek Athena. Hegel’s point here concerns the acquisition of knowledge. Wisdom (Minera) is obtained when it takes place at the end of the day, at dusk. As humans, we come to understand who we are and our place in the world once we look back. Thus history has a certain developmental logic, and time here is understood to be part of this developmental logic.

While Hegel’s argument can be a bit mind-numbing and perplexing, I think he has a point that resonates quite well with the Christian perspective of the world.

Consider Mark’s gospel, which opens up with Jesus’ royal announcement: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” The statement captured here is a bit bizarre, for what does it mean to say that the time is fulfilled? In Jesus’ mind, time and the ‘good news’ are somehow connected: the time has come, and something is here (the kingdom of God) that is the good news. According to Mark, the story of the Bible is not fundamentally about us going somewhere. To my mind, I think this is how many Christians, and even non-Christians, envision what Christianity is all about—that this life is primarily about getting to “the end of the game,” as it were.

But this is contrary to Jesus’ teaching.

We speak in conditionals, as if we are promised a tomorrow.

But are we?

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Being on time nowadays is hard. But we ardently get drilled, sometimes even scolded, to do so—from our parents, from our teachers, and from our friends. Yet nothing seems to stick. Perhaps this reflects something deeper about the kinds of humans we are, conditioned in the modern world to think that this universe should run according to our clock.

At Berkeley, we’re swimming in this water.

Here, time does run on our clock. We’ve even coined a term for this: Berkeleytime. Running from class to class, Berkeleytime helps us; it saves those of us who have to make that uphill trek from Dwinelle to Pimentel. We’ve learned to rely on those precious ten minutes. Still, others of us have used those ten minutes liberally; ten minutes have slowly turned into eleven, twelve, and for our very lazy friends, thirteen. For those of us who fall into this latter camp, we think of time in an instrumental fashion.

We think to ourselves, “Perhaps sleeping in ten more minutes will do the job. I mean, c’mon, it’s just ten minutes.” Soon those ten minutes creep into fifteen, then twenty, then thirty—a musical arrangement of alarms.

Berkeleytime, as I’ve come to see it, trains us to think of time in a particular way. This training happens subtly, under the hood of our cognitive faculties. It shapes us and forms us into the types of beings who think that time ought to run according to how we want it to. It reflects something more fun-

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damental about the way we think about the world.

We wear apple watches and countdown new years with extravagant spectacles. We dread Mondays and desperately await for the weekend to come. Summer seems so far away, yet here we are in class dreaming of where we’ll end up in five or ten years, picturing to ourselves a vision of the good life, where we’ll find romance, success, and happiness. “Ah yes, if only we could meet the right one,” we say to ourselves. “Ah yes, if only I had five more minutes, then I’d finish my project and call my parents.” We speak in conditionals, as if we are promised a tomorrow. But are we?

Here, time runs on God’s clock, based on his eternal commitment to our world

Joseph is a third-year political science and philosophy major who spends his time reading, writing, and thinking about big questions. He has a soft spot for theology and music.

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DOES ETERNITY DESTROY MEANING Words Charles Yang

Eternity seems like a strange thing to think about – abstract in the extreme, yet for the Christian, something of everyday importance. But there also exists a secular position on the idea that humans are meant for eternity, which is summarized nicely by New Yorker writer James Wood: “eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life.” It is this position that I want to address here.

In some sense, eternity does blur away the momentousness of anything here on earth. The stress of school, the rat-race of job-seeking – these are all temporary worries, and as Christians, we are fully aware that we are temporary passerby’s exiled in a foreign land, waiting to return to our eternal home. It is indeed a sweet relief to know that the worries the world tries to place on my shoulders are easily brushed off by the “eternal weight of glory” in heaven. But when we accept the “free gift of God”, which is eternal life in Christ Jesus, it also sharpens and brings into focus the glimmers of eternity that ripple throughout our everyday interactions on campus. Our lives have purpose and our actions have consequences, ones that are not easily brushed off or forgotten, if there is indeed a fair and just judge who will consider the consequences of our actions.

Eternity changes our perspective on how we ought to live life on earth and it also obviates the pain we feel at inevitable loss in our lives. Martin Hagglund writes in “This Life” that “if you can lose nothing in eternity, it’s because there is literally nothing left to lose.” Hagglund relates this to the landscape of his homeland in Sweden, how he cares “for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted.” There is perhaps something philosophically attractive about the idea that value is derived from the potential for loss. But I simply want to make the observation that this is not actually how we approach our deepest relationships. The inevitability for loss is not the source of gratitude for a relationship nor the wellspring of its meaning.

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“ The stress of school, the rate-race of job-seeking - these are all temporar y worries, and as Christians, we are fully aware that we are temporar y passerby’s exiled in a foreign land, waiting to return to our eternal home”

For instance, during my summer internship, I was quite close to the interns in my office. We went to the beach together, ate together, and even went skydiving together. Yet there was a clear end-date to our relationship, namely, the end of our internship. And inevitably, we did part ways at the end of the summer to our respective campuses and have not really talked since. This is the clearest example in my own life of relationships from which I found some happiness and also had the clearest expectation of an end date. But I would not say that I derived the most meaning from these relationships because they had the clearest ends.

No, the relationships I value the most are those that I consider for lifetime, the ones that I don’t want to end. And I think that we all have this longing deep in our hearts, to be fully known and fully secure in our relationships, a hunger for the late-night conversation that stretches into the dawn, the long car-ride with a friend that has no destination or end. Indeed, to the christian, it comes as no surprise for we know that “He has put eternity into man’s heart.” and that these earthly desires are mere echo’s and tantalizing hints of the real thing.

The idea that there is a God who is before time and created eternal human souls is central to understanding the Christian life. It is the basic answer to the question of “what happens after we die.” And while many might “come to the table” of Christianity seeking the answer to this question, it turns out that the answer, while both deeply intuitive and surprising, is actually not the foundation of Christianity. The great miracle of Christianity and the source of the deep joy it produces lies not in reaching eternity, but in how God actually made a way for us to join Him in eternity and how it changes our lives here on earth. At the very least, we, as educated students on the Berkeley campus, should pause to consider the idea that if eternity is real, what does it mean for how we live our life? And if it is not, then does it matter at all?

“He has put eternity into man’s heart.”

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Words: Kara Anderson

On Stewarding Time Time is deceivingly simple. It’s constant, unchanging, and entirely unbothered by the institutions framed around it.

Humans regularly leverage time—we buy it, spend it, kill it, save it—but on the other hand, we’re trapped by it. Our relationship with time is complicated, and it’s been theorized from the ancient Egyptians to Kant to a perplexing tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson: “We are prisoners of the present, in perpetual transition from an inaccessible past to an unknowable future.” Time is the most basic—yet most essential—of all commodities, and depending on one’s position, it may be the most wondrous friend or the most haughty foe. And curiously, as complex a force as time is, it’s realized in the ticking of a clock and the turning of pages on a calendar. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” The sum of philosophies about time seem to point to an inherent contradiction: time is omnipresent and universal yet somehow elusive. In less theoretical terms, however, how might we derive meaning from time?

Time is undoubtedly a powerful social tool. The idea that “time is money” has been posited and practiced since at least the days of Benjamin Franklin, and it has only expanded since. Since the Industrial Revolution, societies have radically increased efficiency, developing exponentially more quickly than any other historical period. Developed countries have embraced convenience and come to expect instant gratification. With this transformation, time perception has become ever more precise: we count minutes and hours, whereas our ancestors tracked sunsets and seasons. Time also carries an element of status, the concept of being “both well-off and time-poor” symbolic of success, and participating in the rat race an indicator of privilege—ultimately glorifying busyness. In addition to the technical and social developments of time perception, moreover, there exists a moral perception of time. Consider the expressions “patience is a virtue,” “living a fast life,” or “a day without laughter is a day wasted.” Each of these cliches uses moral language. On a grander scale, people are acutely aware of their own mortality, an awareness which has been shown to influence moral decisions.

And ultimately, there exists a pressure to use our limited time for a great, progressive, enduring purpose: to leave a legacy. The musical Hamilton confronts this pressure through Lin-Manuel Miranda’s prose, “Legacy. What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”

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This idea leads me to wonder if time is simply a means to an end. If how we use our time is meaningful only after we’ve used it, then how—and why—would we consider it in the moment? From a Christian perspective, this question can be answered in a few ways. I believe that the Bible describes time as both a means to an end as well as an end in itself. It does so somewhat counterintuitively, by educating the reader on eternity, a realm beyond finite comprehension, and then relating the eternal life to earthly life (or, for our purposes, eternal time to earthly time). Eternity is, of course, a mind-boggling concept. It encompasses an endless timeline from what always has been to what always will be, with no limit in either direction. God exists in eternity, and the psalmist David writes, “From everlasting to everlasting you are God.” In the New Testament, Peter writes, “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” Throughout the Bible, there are numerous references to heaven, a glorious afterlife of joy and celebration where there will be no pain, no suffering, no toil, and no night, forever. Indeed, Christ’s sacrifice paved the way for imperfect people to have eternal life, and the ultimate end of the Christian life is to transition to one far greater than life on earth.

Admittedly, these series of verses point to an abstract understanding where a certain version, or elevation, of time is the end of purpose itself, while means presumably play a marginal role in the never-ending timeline. And, from this angle, the Bible may seem hopelessly esoteric; it may seem entirely impractical and irrelevant to daily life. But contrary to the sensationalism with which it is often associated, the Bible does not discount the value of time spent and used on earth; rather, it offers wisdom which speaks to the perception and use of finite time. Granted, I am not inclined to adopt the rather extreme view of Rabbi Nachman, who posited that all of time is the present day, therefore only the present day is real, and thus all devotions should be taken up on a daily basis. But Christian interpretations of the Bible also offer practical and applicable understandings to how we understand and value time in our short decades on earth.

A fundamental biblical principle is that human beings are stewards. Humans are unique in this responsibility, as, in the words of C.S. Lewis, they are “amphibians—half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.” In the Church, stewardship is sometimes

mistaken for frugality, but the idea of being a steward encompasses caring for things that are not our own: our lives, the earth, our talents, our labor, and ultimately everything, for it all belongs to God. As stewards of heavenly property, so to speak, we use our earthly time and resources to care for those gifts. This fact circles back to the idea that time is the most basic commodity. It is exchangeable. Time is precious, but it’s unpredictable; Proverbs 27:1 warns, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.” It is based on this value—the significant premium placed on time—that the Bible implores the reader to use time wisely. Christians are not called to simply kill time as they wait for heaven, but are called to “redeeming the time.” The Bible instructs Christians to make the most of earthly time—quite the practical statement. Scripture also offers what is arguably strategic guidance on using time profitably when it says, “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.”

How does this practical wisdom, however, relate to eternal time? If the Christian view claims that time is both the means and the end for humanity, then these two versions of time must somehow coalesce. And indeed they do. In earthly life, the Christian is called to do everything for the glory of God. We are reminded that in accepting the gift of salvation, we are “bought with a price,” thus stewards of our own lives for God’s purpose. By glorifying the infinite God in our finite lives, we are partners in a relationship of heaven touching earth. In the Christian life, then, earthly time is valuable as is eternal time. The limitations of the finite timeline do not nullify the value of earthly time itself, neither does the grandeur and mystery of heaven contradict eternal time’s ultimacy. Earthly time must not be squandered in the name of eternity, but it is managed for eternity’s sake. In the perpetual stewarding of these worlds of time, then, the Christian looks to Psalm 90:12, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

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An Interview with

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WHAT IS YOUR MOST RECENT RESEARCH FOCUSING ON? HOW IS IT RELATED TO THE CONCEPT OF TIME? We’re essentially working on how to transform the practice of pediatrics to help pediatricians and other healthcare professionals who take care of children to be more aware, more sensitive, and more responsive to the trauma and the stressors that kids experience.

And we’re trying to understand more about where this business of resilience versus vulnerability comes from. We’re convinced that it has something to do with the interaction between genetic variation and environmental variation, so-called gene-environment interactions. The time element that comes into this is that we’re also increasingly aware that developmental time seems to play a role in how those gene-environment interactions actually occur, and the consequences of them. So the time-work that we’ve been doing is to try to understand these sort of triadic interactions between genes, environments, and time: time being the course of development that a child follows over a certain trajectory.

W. Thomas Boyce

TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF AND THE KIND OF RESEARCH THAT YOU’RE WORKING ON NOW. I’m a pediatrician by training. I’ve always worked in an academic setting, so I am now an emeritus professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at UCSF. Early in my training, I had an interest in stress and trauma in kids’ lives and how it may affect their biology and make them more susceptible to both physical and mental illness. That’s really what I’ve studied for thirty, forty years.

We realized early on that there was a lot of variation in how kids responded to stress in their lives and we tried to operationalize that, and measure it by bringing kids into a lab and having them go through a series of mildly challenging tasks. Then, we measured aspects of bodily function: autonomic nervous system responses and responses of the adrenocortical system. We found that there was a subgroup of kids -- about 1 in 5 -- who had these really exaggerated responses, biologically, to the things that we were asking them to do. When we studied those kids, out in the real world, we found that they either had the worst illness histories of any of the children that we studied, or they had the best. The sense that we made of that was that these are children who are extremely sensitive and extremely porous to the things that they experience in their external world. And when they’re being reared in stressful conditions, whether at school or at home or in the community, they really have a lot of problems. They develop behavioral and psychiatric disorders; they have recurrent infections; and they have more injuries than other children. But those same kids, if they’re being reared in very supportive, predictable conditions, actually have better outcomes than the other children that we studied. So we used this metaphor of the orchid and the dandelion. Orchid children are those that, like the orchid, are exquisitely sensitive to the conditions that they’re being cultivated in. And dandelion children are like dandelions: they grow anywhere you plant them, and they do fine in a whole variety of different conditions.

So the book that I published last year is based on that work.

W. Thomas Boyce is professor emeritus of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, where he formerly served as the Lisa and John Pritzker Distinguished Professor of Developmental and Behavioral Health. He previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley and at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of the book The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive, which was published in 2019.

AS MEASURED BY THE DAYS OF DEVELOPMENT? OR HOW DO YOU MEASURE TIME? Well, that’s a good question. We measure in part by chronological age, the sort of linear time of each of us getting older by a day everyday, and thinking about it not just in childhood but over the lifespan as well. But interestingly, even at the cellular level, we age differently from one individual to another, and we’ve been developing a set of measures that are called epigenetic clocks, where we look at the epigenome and how it evolves over the course of a child’s childhood and adolescence.

We find that kids under adversity have aging at the cellular level that happens faster than kids who are not experiencing that adversity.

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT AGING? ARE GENES BEING TURNED OFF? Genes could be turned off or on. We’re particularly interested in the epigenome, which is kind of where genetic variation meets environmental variation. It’s the part of the genome that lies on top of the DNA sequence, and it can change from day to day, month to month, year to year. And we find more of those changes in the kids who are sustaining these kinds of traumas.

ARE YOU ABLE TO DETERMINE IF THE CHANGES ARE PERMANENT? We think they’re not permanent. We thought, thirty years ago, that once a gene was methylated that that was a permanent mark; it turns out that’s not the case at all. These marks, and all the different kinds of epigenetic marks on the epigenome, can come and go depending upon one’s experience day to day, week to week.

WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THAT? HOW MUCH CHANGE CAN THERE BE LATER IN LIFE, AND WHAT’S THE TIMING FOR THAT? We think that when a child has an epigenetic clock that is accelerated and that is aging faster than it should be for the child’s chronological age, there are certain kinds of developmental landmarks that happen earlier than in other kids. An example: It’s now well known that young girls growing up in families where there is a lot of conflict, sometimes when a father is absent, or a father that’s mean or aggressive, seem to go into puberty and experience menarche earlier than girls from families where there are two supportive parents. So we think that those kinds of early developmental changes are happening at a rapid rate among kids who are experiencing threat and potential harm.

HOW DO YOU VIEW YOUR WORK AS A CHRISTIAN? At one level, one of the benefits of studying the incredible, extraordinary intricacies of human biology, and biology in general, is just a sense of awe at the creation and the reality that we are creatures created by God. Every year we get a finer and finer vision of how unique and idiosyncratic and complicated the creation actually is. That, as a Christian, is a wonderful thing to behold. Unfortunately, it’s not something that all scientists are aware of or interpret in that manner. I think one of the things that I’m vividly aware of in my field as a scientist and doing research is how little appreciation and awareness there is of the creation and what a wonder it is as we explore it and learn more about it.

ARE THERE WAYS IN WHICH YOU SEE YOUR SPECIFIC RESEARCH CONNECTING TO WHAT GOD CALLS US TO DO? So I mentioned these so-called orchid children who have this exquisite sensitivity to their environments. One of the things that we’ve learned clinically about these children is that they’re very responsive to what the Bible calls steadfast love. They are kids who, even within a given family, if the parents are able to offer this kind of steadfast love and care for those kids, they are exquisitely responsive to those experiences of love. So that’s one example of how what we learn through the Bible and through the teachings of Christ get played out in the lives of children.

The other thing that our work has made me aware of is just how extraordinarily diverse the human population is. It is diverse in every way. One sort of diversity that I’ve focused on is the business of stress reactivity and how huge the divide is between children who have a lot of stress reactivity and those who have less. But the human population is diverse in all kinds of ways, and it’s given me an abiding sense that that diversity is loved by God. There’s a love within the universe that not only celebrates that diversity but also in some way created it. That’s been helpful to me especially in the last two years because two years ago I developed an invasive skin cancer that grew from the skin into my forehead, down into my face, and into my facial nerve, and it required me to go through a huge surgical procedure and then chemotherapy and radiation. My peace and confidence and hope about all of that derives directly from my sense of God’s love and his abiding care for me even with half of a face that works, and half of a beard instead of a whole beard. As you go along in life, the kinds of Christian teachings that we know about and receive from the Church and from others is a way of dealing with the vicissitudes and difficulties that life brings.

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Dearest Friend

LETTER JUSTIN FUNG

(Today) Dearest Friend, I write to you today, conflicted, trying to reconcile eternity with my present circumstances.

I wake up, pondering whether it’s worth getting out of bed. And, of course, the prospect of tasty dining hall food compels me to get up, but I often lie here, praying and reasoning out my plans for the day.

“I should probably get up to do work,” I think to myself. “But what’s the point? Does anything I do make a difference? And did I not think the same way yesterday?”

Most days, I’d sideline my thoughts and get up, going about my business. But, not today.

Today, I’ll process eternity.

My shower shoes squeak as I meander into the shower. Preparing myself for a flood of predictably cold water, I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and turn the knob.

God, an eternal being, has set time into motion and continues to touch the world throughout time. And we, simple humans, have been allowed by God to know that eternity exists and to live with the understanding of our limited time on earth and our eternal time with God.

And yet, my thoughts of eternity do not always result in joy. Yes, eternity exists, but each day depresses me with the seeming lack of weight of my actions. I have accomplished nothing and, even for the little I have accomplished, won’t it all be lost in eternity?

In the book of Ecclesiastes, a king described as King Solomon illustrates, contrary to us, a man on the top of the world. He has acquired gold and silver, created houses, vineyards, gardens, parks, reservoirs, herds and flocks, summing it all up as the delights of a man’s heart (Ecclesiastes 2:4-8).

Continuing, he states, “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil.”

Yet, he ends with this, “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

This man has it all, and yet, he says the things he’s done are in vain. Will all be lost with the gust of successive autumns and frozen winters? Will my legacy be nothing?

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LETTER JUSTIN FUNG

Clearly not. What we do must count for something, rather, “What for?”. If we are to do anything meaningful, we must be able to answer this question. Surely I can synthesize something to fill my own desire to direct my efforts. Yet, will it last? Can we, as finite beings, create something that will last even 365 successive sunsets? 1095 sunrises? And beyond that?

I must admit, I’m hesitant to say yes. And no. Perhaps, my friend, I have focused too much on myself; we must remember what God has done for us.

Paul, in his writings to the Christians in Ephesus, reminds them of what God has done, “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,” God has saved us, and it is a gift, something we do not deserve. And this, this absolute implies we are more than dust. Before we consider the purpose of our work, we must reflect on the purpose of ourselves. And what for?

“So that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.”

We are evidence of his mercy; He has taken us, people who are tainted and unworthy, and allowed us to sit at his side and partake in something eternal. Out of this great love, then, we are to see that what we do is not for us, but for God; what we do holds a weight that remains forever, and is meant to display God’s goodness.

Out of this great love, then, we are to see that what we do is not for us, but for God; what we do holds a weight that remains forever, and is meant to display God’s goodness.

So, eating another carne asada burrito has physical weight, yes, but also eternal weight, too. Granted, God has allowed us to consume an amazing burrito, but what could we be doing with our time rather than doing that? How then should our priorities align with the reality of limited time?

Dearest, the world, as it has been described to us, is one with infinite consequences for every action. Our work matters, yet daily, we are pressed to think that we are nothing more than a pebble in a river. We struggle daily to do much of anything, much less anything of worth, and easily lose sight of our purpose. We seek the good of now, rather than the goodness of God.

Perhaps I have processed this for nothing, but maybe, for you, I have not. Remember, today, your time is limited. Use it well.

Love, Justin

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ART CREDIT FRONT COVER

KATHERINE YUHAN

2-3

PATRICIA TSE

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JUSTIN FUNG

6-7

JUKAN TATEISI

8-9

NASA

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SARAH MEYER ANDRIK LANGFIELD

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ETIENNE BÖSIGE

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JOHN TOWNER

14 - 15

KATHERINE YUHAN

18-19

MALTE SCHMIDT

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SINGLELINE

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JAVIER GARCÍA

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ALEXANDER POSSINGHAM FERNANDO HERNANDEZ

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FRANK R PRISCILLA DU PREEZ

BACK COVER

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KATHERINE YUHAN

“He has made everything beautiful in its time.

Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

Ecclesiastes 3:11

unknowngodjournal.wordpress.com

unkowngodjournal.wordpress.com

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