The Wrong End of the Telescope

Long Ago and Far Away

We all know what a telescope does. We look through it at things far away and they appear large and clear and immediate.

But turn that same telescope around and take a gander.

Everything looks small and distant.

The Prude spent much of her life looking through the wrong end of the Time Telescope.

Young Prude, told by her parents that she had 30 minutes to clean her room, would grab her Time Telescope, peer through the wrong end, and note that 30 minutes was so far in the future that she had time to read another chapter­–possibly 2 or 3–of Nancy Drew.  Imagine her shock when, after half an hour, she would hear a knock on the door of her disheveled room.

The correct end of the telescope displayed, up close and personal, the stern and glowering eye of a parent.

Homework assignments hovered unobtrusively in the distance and never loomed ominously till the proverbial 11^th hour.

Then Teen Prude would feel the hot Deadline breath blasting through the right end of the Time Telescope.

Adult Prude had 10 months–such a vast expanse of time!– to prepare her wedding. She crammed most of it into the morning she said her vows. She had to hold off the birth of her first-born a week to get his nursery ready.

Parties she planned remained pleasantly in the far and distant future. The Prude would merrily go about her business, occasionally glancing backward through that telescope until the morning of said party, when the relentless Time Telescope, looked through in the manner in which it was intended, showed guests heading for a half-cleaned house and a half-cooked meal.

When The Prude was young she looked at her parents’ mortality through the wrong end of the telescope too. It always remained, small and distant and unthreatening, in the future.

And then suddenly her parents were old. TIme, cold and unheeding of her protests, thrust it’s Telescope into The Prude’s hands. What she thought was so distant was a present reality. Her father was gone.

Four years ago, December 30, Time softly closed the door on my mother’s life. Both ends of the telescope looked black.

Today each end of my Time Telescope shows a past horizon of love and a future horizon dancing with hope.  And my parents have no need of the Time Telescope anymore.

They see their Savior face to face.