For a Time, Times, and Half a Time
The days continue. The sun rises, the sunsets, and tomorrow comes, then tomorrow and the tomorrow after that. After another tomorrow and another, the day that we always look to today with great anticipation and hope, arrives, and we find that tomorrow is not unlike today, and we shift our focus again, out into the distance, and say, “come tomorrow…..”
My opening ramblings, I swear, are not just another whiskey sodden jeremiad about the current state of the universe as we have endured in recent days. I honestly don’t know how many ways in which we have heard, said, and read, that this is something we have never experienced.
If you look closely at the featured image above, you will see the Columbian Progress Newsstand, and you will see a headline similar to those in which we have become by now, all too familiar. Then the top center, you will see that the date is Thursday, March 19, 2020. I pass by this newsstand numerous times per day, Monday through Friday, and on occasion, even weekends. I almost always glance at it, and instantly curse under my breath, because the news is the same as it was yesterday and the day before and for all of the yesterdays since March 19.
At this moment, it is May 2, 2020, and I know that I’ll pass the newsstand again and again, with no new news inside. Most days, I awake, and just like most everybody, I dread going to work. It’s not that I dread the actual work, once I’m dressed and there, it’s fine. Then I feel guilty a little because there are many who, by some decision made by committee, were deemed non-essential and with the stroke of a pen, mandated to stay home. So I go and I give thanks that I’ve been spared and am allowed to proceed with my day.
Each day, I arise and I meet the challenges as best as I can. I continue to gaze toward that distant tomorrow when the current reality is in the proverbial rearview mirror because I know realistically that the immediate tomorrows hold little hope. Daily, I hear “when everything gets back to normal,” and daily, the optimism in the voice of the speaker sounds a little weaker than yesterday.
Then there are the jackals, the politicians who are using this period in history to jockey for gain. I’m not going to say much, because I don’t want my site to take that turn. Simply put, THIS IS NOT THE TIME! Right now, leadership should be working for EVERY American, and it just makes me sick to see this POLITICAL bullshit! It is the opinion of DBeazy that there should be term limits for every single elected official, period.
For many, we know there will be no tomorrow. A terrible reality in this situation is that people are spending their last days alone without family present, only medical staff and hospital employees. And families are robbed of the opportunity to say their goodbyes. I admit that I don’t know how many people die on a normal day in this country, but there is a weight associated with the ever-climbing number of daily reported deaths. The weight grows with every report.
The thought occurred to me when I considered the unchanging headlines in that newsstand. Briefly, I asked myself, “Did God come to rapture his church and found no one worthy?” Of course, I know this hasn’t happened, if, for no other reason, the cemeteries that I pass in my daily travels lay undisturbed. A line from the Bible came to mind: time, times, and a half. I did a little research and quickly found it in the Book. If you have spent any time reading the Bible, you know that chapter and verse pertaining to prophecy are the more difficult to understand. And of course, there are all of these scholarly people who attempt to make this a mathematical equation that once solved, would reveal the exact time in history in which certain events will occur. Others view it not as a numeric thing, but some cryptic code that once broken would reveal the same. Personally, I tend to understand the Bible in the most simplistic way that I can, as opposed to those who try to unravel broader Biblical concepts. So for what it is worth, I believe it isn’t that difficult. I just don’t believe that God requires us to be able to meet some academic standards to be accepted into the hereafter. Yes, Daniel was referring to time, or a period of time, given him by the angel Gabriel. But it is symbolic as well, like my analogy of the newsstand.
We all experience periods of trial in our lives. It just so happens that in the case of COVID-19, practically every living thing on the planet is more or less subjected to unprecedented trials simultaneously. Seemingly, it is louder though, due to the fact that in this, some who have never experienced brutal trials in life are experiencing them now. In the Bible, Daniel uses the “Time” to describe a period of trial. He uses the word “Times,” to represent a period of “double trouble,” for lack of a more eloquent way of saying it. But the message isn’t that. The message or the “good news” lies in the phrase, “Half a time.” This is the part when God is there to step in and make these trials bearable, or “half as difficult.” The sidebar, of course, is that this only applies to those whose names are written in the Book of Life, by the way. And conversely, those who aren’t in the book, well, it doesn’t end well.
As for me, I will continue to walk past the newsstand. I will continue to consider the date at the top of the page. I will continue to march forward, daily, through time, times, and a half a time, until that tomorrow arrives. On that day, I’ll notice that the date at the top is different, and the headline will then read, “IT IS FINISHED!”