Prayer. (In lieu of Study Questions from Acts 12/30)
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| Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash |
The last 25-30% of our class time each week is a time of sharing prayer requests and answers to prayer. The requests and praises are recorded by one of our members who emails them out to our mailing list every week. I keep my own copy of the list, primarily because it helps me pray intelligently at the conclusion of each class session.
Wednesday I will present a summary of the prayer requests from each month of 2018. Specifics of the requests are not included. I suspect that a census of the requests is better terminology.
To prepare you for Wednesday, I offer the following look at prayer from the perspective of a lay person. Unless cited, thoughts are mine. Some are my memory of something I heard. Others are original iterations of concepts within the topic.
Prayer is a great gift from a loving God.
Think about it.
The God of the universe wants to spend time with YOU and me every day.
One-on-one.
That's right. When you are praying, God is entirely focused on you and your prayer!
"Yeah, right," you might be saying. "There are eight billion people in the world. If each person got one second of God's time, I'd get one second every 258 years!"
That depends on what time you're talking about.
Dr. Stan Chester was a renown Messianic Jew. I use the past tense because I don't know if he is still living. Considering his involvement in the politics of Israel and her neighbors during the 1970s and 80s, there is a good chance he lost his life working for peace.
Dr. Chester explained that the ancient Jewish concept of time--and perhaps still the Jewish concept--was simple. To paraphrase,
All time exists all the time.
If that's the case, giving each of us time in prayer is easy!
I chose to use this time concept in my book, INSECTICIDE - A Science Fiction Thriller. What follows is how I incorporated this Jewish concept of time in the belief system of the main characters of the story, the Clurn. The text makes up pages 305-307 in the print edition.
What time is it?
Time belongs to no Clurn. It can be neither given away nor received from another.
The Sacred Text of Bafwique:
“Truths for Life” - Stanza LXXI, Line 01
Translated by universal translating software
developed by the Intergalactic Alliance
The Bafwiqueian concept of time is significantly different from the idea of time held by most inhabitants of Terra. I want to describe it briefly.
Throughout Bafwiqueian history, time has been, more or less, a necessary evil. The terms for time units are not unique as in many/most cultures. The name of each time unit was created by the addition of a suffix35 to the name of each preceding unit. Another oddity is the translation carnottiop can mean week or month—which may not have been the case on Bafwique.
35 In the Bafwiqueian language, the number of additional letters added is proportional to the difference in time contained in each described unit, something that is lost in translation.
Cosmologists and physicists both contributed to the final Bafwiqueian theory of time from the scientific side. Evidence that clergy from the dominant Bafwiqueian religion were additional contributors can be implied from the fragments of Sacred Text recovered by anthropological research teams of the Intergalactic Alliance.
The final iteration of the Bafwiqueian theory of time is best translated as Simultaneous Chronosity. An incomplete description of the concept follows.
According to Simultaneous Chronosity Theory (SCT), TIME IS. In other words, all time exists at all time(s).
What we perceive as past, present, and future are simultaneous events in the vast cloud of time vapor. Minuscule droplets of time are roughly analogous to what Terrans know as seconds—paradoxically these fundamental units are known in the SCT as clurn36. By vaporizing a clurn, time units smaller than one second are generated.
36 The time unit clurn is always all lower case—and is another example of a term that is both singular and plural in Bafwiqueian lexicon.
The lifespan of an individual Clurn (a member of the species) is formed by a cloud of an inestimable number of clurn (the time units) that exit the egg with the hatchling at birth. Life progresses as clurn adhere to one another for some length of time. Individual clurn may, or may not, remain attached as a unique collection of clurn for extended intervals.
According to SCT, there is an infinite number of clurn in the universe. During a lifetime, an individual’s clurn cloud of life will overlap with clurn clouds of other individuals as they interact with one another. The overlapping of clurn clouds is how more than one individual remembers the same event(s) happening during any specific period of time.
At the end of an individual’s lifespan, it is theoretically possible to unravel a string of clurn from death backward to birth37—and stop at any point in time along that pathway. Due to the inestimable number of clurn in a life, unraveling a time string necessarily omits chunks of the lifetime of the individual. However, according to this theory, an outside observer could experience any event in any life of any Clurn, at any time, by locating the necessary clurn that originally described that event.
37 Two undocumented sources in the Intergalactic Alliance claim to have witnessed the unraveling of an individual’s string of life clurn at separate funerary functions. The account given here is a synthesis of both descriptions.
Therefore, what is termed the present by Clurn is the current collection of clurn in that individual’s string of life. The past is a designation for the associated and disassociated clurn collections that were part of an individual’s string of life. The “future” will be formed by whatever collection of clurn coalesces by: a) chance or predictable pathway (the science of time) or b) intervention by the Great One (Bafwiqueian theology).
* * *
I now offer my final serving of this unconventional history. It is intentional irony that the names of the three parts of this historical account have the names they do:
Part I: In the Ancient Times
Part II: In the Time Between Times
Part III: The Contemporary Time
Clurn reading this would find it humorous that the events described in the Epilogue appear to happen in Terran future.
Who knows when they (will/did) happen?
I'd appreciate your feedback on Blogger!
According to linkedin Dr Chester is still alive. 😊
ReplyDeleteGood news!
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