God's Time

Today’s post is a short one and likely the last one from C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity” for awhile. His last few chapters are slightly confusing as he is trying to explain the Christian belief of the Trinity. He has one very interesting thought however that I would like to share. It deals with the question of how God can handle listening to prayers of millions of people at a time. He writes,

“Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty – and every other moment from the beginning of the world—is always in the present for Him. If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

That is difficult, I know. Let me try to give something, not the same, but a bit like it. Suppose I am writing a novel. I write ‘Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!’ For Mary who has to live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary’s maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing that first half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary’s time (the time inside the story) at all.”

This is quite a concept and makes sense to me. Any thoughts???