In our troubled time, take comfort in the vastness of God’s eternity

A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

Do you ever feel like you’re living through a particularly troubled time?

Bad things happen all the time—accidents, illness, sudden deaths: Any of these things can happen regardless of whether or not there is great evil happening elsewhere in the world. These are human problems, the day-to-day tragedies that are an ordinary part of our existence. Something bad is happening to someone in the world every second of every day. Conversely, good things are happening all the time, too. We know these statements to be implicitly true.

However, it is another thing altogether to be living through a troubled time, because the suffering is obvious and shared between everyone. No longer are you experiencing a mere individual tragedy. Instead, what you are experiencing is a troubling existence that affects everyone around you. It has happened many times in history. In the past century alone, there have been genocides and holocausts and decades of wars both hot and cold.

It can be tempting to imagine that history has an inherent upward trajectory. Oh, we were less enlightened in the old days, weren’t we? We used to have human sacrifices and didn’t know anything about germs! But as we’ve proven time and again, the human capacity for awfulness is something we just cannot seem to shake. There is still genocide happening in this world. There is still endless conflict over religion and land. There is still so much separating each of us from the other.

What makes it worse is when it seems that the institutions upon which we’ve put our trust—our governments, our communities, our families—seem to be at constant war with each other. Sociopolitical division has made it seem impossible that we can ever reach a point of mutual understanding and compassion toward each other again. And the worst part is we may actually reach that point again someday. I look at what’s happening in the world and think, “Maybe in fifty years, there will be peace. Maybe in a hundred.” The point is, I’m not sure if I’m going to be alive to see it.

FOMO is an interesting way to frame peace, but surely peace is one of the most important things to fear missing out on! Every time we feel despair that times we’re living in aren’t exactly the best, perhaps it would be helpful to look at it from God’s perspective. Our view of history is so short, but God’s view spans all of it.

Take this reading from the Book of Baruch, for instance, which takes place during the Babylonian Exile. This was a period of time during which the ancient Jews were exiled from Judea by the Babylonians, and it lasted somewhere around 70 years, which in other words, was a lifetime. Let’s say you were born right before or at the beginning of the exile—what were the chances that you were going to live to see your people return to their homeland? This sort of decades-long framing happens a lot in the Bible. The exodus from Egypt, which is referenced in the reading, took 40 years to complete,and Moses famously died before they got to Canaan. In our own Christian history, it took 300 years before the religion became legal in the Roman Empire, and there was no shortage of suffering in that time, either.

These are huge timescales to us: imagine 300 years of persecution and suffering, or 40 years of wandering in the desert, or 70 years of trying and failing to restore your homeland. But to God, these are periods of time during which the correct pieces are being placed on the board, all part of a much, much larger tapestry of history so that his justice can be achieved. Whenever you feel troubled about the state of the world and the people in it, think of God’s eternal perspective: Our boat is so small, but we are in the vastness of God’s sea. Trust that you’ll eventually get to brighter shores.

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