I work for a radio station, as some of you will know. And we have buttons. Lots of them. And my favourite, is the dump button.
We run on an 8-second delay. That means I will say something in the studio and the computer holds onto that for 8 seconds before it gets sent to your stereo where ever you are in the world. We do this so that if something bad happens (like a swear or something) we have 8 seconds to hit that dump button, and stop whatever it was from being heard. I press that button and the computer skips over that 8 seconds completely and brings you (the listener) right up to the current actual real-time now, instead of the “fake” now of 8 seconds ago. Confused?
If you are, I’ve learned it’s moments like this where only one man can help explain the idea. Please welcome to my blog,
Nicolas Cage.
-he ambles in and droningly says hello, twitching (because I’ve noticed he always seems to have a twitch, or a look on his face like he really needs to twitch and is trying very hard not to)-
I don’t know if you ever saw the movie Next starring old twitchy-cage here, where the guy could see 10 seconds into the future, and the police use him to find criminals and predict lotto and stuff like that. I don’t recommend it as a film. But the concept is kinda weird. Here is a guy who can see WHERE HE IS GOING TO BE 10 SECONDS FROM RIGHT NOW.
He can’t change it. But he gets a glimpse of the future. It’s like he’s living with a reverse view of the dump button.
In radio, pressing the dump button is awkward. People hear the audio get cut-off and know that something happened. They’re not sure WHAT happened, or what they just missed (or maybe that they just missed anything at all) but it’s pretty easy to spot.
They are given a glimpse of the future, it seems. And it is weird because they don’t get to hear that 8 seconds that you cut.
To take another angle (and the angle this post was ORIGINALLY intended for… i think), life doesn’t have a dump button.
Did you know that?
To quote my good friend Rob Bell (whose DVD “Everything Is Spiritual” is awesome btw), we live in a half-dimension of time.
See one dimension would give us forward and backward.
For us, time only goes forward. Constantly and consistently. Every second lasting exactly the same amount of time as the last second. And there is no way to make it stop doing that.
There is no 8 second buffer to skip over idiot mistakes like saying something stupid, or accidentally pushing on a “pull” door.
There is no undo.
There is no ‘live-pause-and-rewind’ feature.
But God can, and does do this awesome thing sometimes. We can get “glimpses” of what will be.
You can read it His book. You could ask Him and He might tell you something of it, although He has a knack for keeping specific details to Himself sometimes.
And with His grace, He is okay that we make mistakes and blunders, and that we don’t have a dump button to remove them.
Would love to hear what you’re thinking about this right now. Comment, or email me.
And I’m still keen for that coffee I talked about a bit ago.
dg.
