The above quote holds special interest for me. So does the prophet Alma’s expression that we are “wanderers in a strange land” of mortality (Alma 13:23). While there is much joy to be had in the “here and now” of life, the truth is that we ultimately belong somewhere else. Like Moses and his wandering Israelites, we too are in exile. This idea supports the well-loved and oft-quoted saying by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
Neal A. Maxwell’s point is a little more specific, however: time is the particular feature of this mortal landscape that can make it feel so incongruous to us. After all, as Alma also taught, “time is only measured unto men” (Alma 40:8).
No wonder Elder Maxwell says that as misfits in this temporal framework, “we find ourselves wishing to hasten the passage of time,” or on other occasions, “hold back the dawn.” He has also written that
“God does not live in the dimension of time as do we. We are not only hampered by our finiteness (experiential and intellectual), but also by being in the dimension of time.”
I have thought a lot about this incongruity throughout my life — especially at goodbyes. Witnessing the death of loved ones, leaving home in my late teens, watching my children grow and eventually leave home — these and so many other moments have certainly made me wish that I too could “hold back the dawn.” How can we mitigate the pain of such moments?
My best thinking on this subject so far has led me to two strategies:
1) to do all I can to make it back to the timeless realm of heaven, where “all things are present with [God]” (Moses 1:6), and
2) to strive to capitalize upon the time I do have in the here and now.
With these two solutions to the problem of time in mind, I set out to make a web site that contained writings and resources that supported both ends: spiritual writings to address the first (particularly through the study of scripture), and productivity/time management resources to address the second. And the name of the site was to be Strangers in Time.
As you may have noticed, the actual name of the url to this web site is strangersintime.com; barryhillam.com is just a forwarder. As I started to build the site out, however, I realized that it would probably be better, at least for now, to just use my own name — especially due to the emergence of my podcast in the meantime.
So if you notice the strangersintime.com name showing up in your browser, that is why. You can get to this site that way too. I remain enamored with the idea that we are strangers in time. Maybe I will build upon that concept more completely in the future. For now, however, I hope that you benefit from what is here — a web site that is dedicated exclusively to the study of scripture. Please keep in touch.
Your Fellow Wanderer,
Barry Hillam