Quotes of the Day for January 2, 2026 – Thoughts on experiencing time in and as God’s time
- Michael Haldas
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
“Many of us long for the past because we believe, correctly, that the past uniquely offered something that satisfied a core human need—namely, the need for hope for something better and everlasting beyond this life, which communities steeped in religious tradition, in which faith formed the center of one’s life and permeated every aspect of it, were able to inspire. In short, this past provided the means by which man’s spiritual thirst could be quenched. The tragedy of the present condition consists not only in the fact that we are dying of this thirst, but also of our ignorance of the reason for—or even the fact of—our condition, as well as the truth that the cure lies within our own hearts, buried though it is beneath layers of selfish and worldly attachments.” (Dr. Amir Azarvan)
“A very important theological point for us – creation was initiated by God with its intended end in God. We, as well as all of creation, are being drawn to the eschaton, to the climatic end which God has prepared for us.…we are to be oriented to that future eschaton, we are not to be focused on the past. Debating the literalness of Genesis will not help us understand what it is to be human, or what humans were created for. We will not learn our fate in Adam, but rather in Christ in the eschaton. To constantly focus on Adam or original sin is to lose the focus which we should have in Christ which is our salvation. Great Lent should be as geared toward the eschaton as is Pascha. The sin of Adam and Eve has no eternal consequence – just think about the Paschal icons of Christ’s descent into Hades. Christ is resurrecting Adam and Eve, their sin is forgiven and wiped away!” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“It was the Church that gave us clocks (of a sort). The word, “clock,” gives it away. It’s origin is from a word meaning a “bell.” And it was the bells in a monastery that signaled the times for prayer…The first calendar was the sky itself, as the position of the Sun and the stars marked the passage of the seasons. In ancient lands of every sort, the calendar of the sky became a basis for the development of mathematics. Its orderly procession through the year was also seen as a reflection of a divine order that suffused creation itself. It is creation of the Sun and Moon and stars, day and night, that open the book of Genesis. It is also in that first chapter that we are told of the calendar days, a cycle of seven that set the heartbeat or rhythm of time.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“I realized, then, how formless our own experience of time is in the twenty-first century, untethered not just from prayer but from sun or moon, season or tide. The internet never sleeps, electricity means that darkness need not halt work, and we are too worldly wise and weary to shape our days by any great story…When I choose to shape the hours of my life in such a way that they become the space in which I listen for God’s voice and expect his arrival, I am entering the Christian way of understanding time as redeemed from a fallen cascade into disaster by the arrival of God himself in the circles of our embodied days.” (Sarah Clarkson)
“There is no time with God. We can’t expect things to happen within a certain timeframe. Things will happen when we are ready, but we ourselves may never understand when we’ll be ready. Things will happen when it’s God’s time, not when we think the time is right. If we give up every expectation and leave it to God—there is our patience established! There is nothing to be anxious about.” (Bishop Emilianos)