A Philosophy About Love and Time

There is more to love than getting your own way.

And when we think about love in those sorts of terms – as we read those words and say them aloud – we recognise the folly of thinking that love with a partner is anything about ourselves at all.

Of course, love makes sense when our partners think the same way – love is not about them either; not from their personal viewpoint.

Love is about the other person entirely. That is the perfection of love we are to strive to attain.

Love has the ideal of outdoing; of transcending because it can.

Love is a gift in that it has to be given. It’s a gift that must be received to be of effect. Love is a gift that keeps on giving, for the nature of love is selfless and inspiring. Love finds a way to love. It refuses to accept that love is a waste, and to believe in love is to believe in hope and joy and fortitude; strength and compassion and the ability to overcome the worsening of odds.

Love is the way of a world surrendered to no one or nothing other than the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Now, time.

Inscribed beneath some of the grandest large clocks of the world is this resounding inscription:

“No minute gone comes ever back again.

Take heed and see ye nothing do in vain.”

Time is no person’s debtor. Father Time is an eternal figure with an eternal mandate: to forever present the incidence of existence, which can only run forward, to a desperate world thriving and surviving only in time.

Time is cataclysmic. It is as big as love is so far as the world is concerned, but in the realm of eternity time has no relevance. But almost nothing is more important than time, here, on the Earth, in the body.

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So, now let’s bring them together: love and time.

Do you have more time than you have to love or not love? You can only love for the time you have. “A minute gone,” that which is done “in vain,” where we have missed the mark in accord with the ancient call of love, is an eternal waste – an dull echo of null in eternity.

We have time and we have the motive to love. Nothing else do we have. God gives both as God also takes both away. Blessed be the name of the Lord as we serve both ends: love with intent and time with effect.

Time is in short supply. Love is the highest goal. The purpose of life is to love whilst we have time.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.