The Fullness of Time

"The Fullness of Time". I just love that phrase. For Presbyterians, we hear it mostly in our communion liturgies which outline the mighy works of God from Creation through the lives of the Prophets. And then, so the liturgy goes something like, "Then, in the fullness of time, God sent His only Son, Jesus."

I guess I like that idea so much because it helps us remember that God's concept of time and our own are so different and yet, "fullness of time" makes the difference sound so poetic, instead of condescending.

We see this idea of the "fullness of time" in our own lives when we have an idea and then it takes years to come about. Just last week, for instance, I was taking a walk with Rev. Chris Erdman of Fresno, California and he was talking about seeing an installment of origami peace doves at a conference or some other place he had been, about a decade ago. He told me that he had always wanted to have something similar in one of the churches he served, but it was not until he was in Fresno and shared the idea with the right person, some nine years after he had first seen the original installment, that it actually came about, so to speak, in "the fullness of time."

Recently I have had a similar experience. About half a dozen years ago, while I was the associate pastor at Church of the Hills in Evergreen, CO. I was either surfing the net or looking through a magazine when I saw a Prayer Labyrinth on the floor of a church--it may have been at the famous Episcopal Church in San Francisco--and I thought that would be a great thing to bring into a Presbyterian Church. However, the church in Evergreen was not the place. When I came to Twin Falls I shared the idea with a group that were exploring different prayer practices and they got the conversation started and in Fall 2007 a simple Cretan Prayer Labyrinth was installed in one of the rooms. Recently the Cretan one was upgraded to a 6-Circuit Neo Medieval Prayer Labyrinth that is simply beautiful and it came about through the "fullness of time."

So where and how is God at work in your life, bringing about something through the "fullness of time."