Jesus has demonstrated that it is possible to live as a finite human in a broken world and to do so well. Jesus was joyfully busy with His Father’s work all of His short days on earth, and He has now conquered, and He is sitting down in the presence of the Father.

Tara Westover’s Educated describes her Dad’s frenzied labour as a scrap worker extracting value from piles of rubbish.

“Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky. In the anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel. Dad saw every piece of scrap as the money it could be sold for, minus the time needed to sort, cut and deliver it. Every slab of iron, every ring of copper tubing was a nickel, a dime a dollar—less if it took more than two seconds to extract and classify. And he constantly weighed these meager profits against the hourly expense of running the house. He figured that to keep the lights on, the house warm, he needed to work at breakneck speed.”

I don’t want that to be my heart. And yet too many days I’m tempted to feel that way. Planning my weeks and my days is a constant exercise in frustration. Invariably I write down only a small portion of the things I desperately need to accomplish. Invariably, my attempts at modest expectations are far too ambitious and I enter the following week looking at more than half of what I had hoped to complete. Rinse and repeat.

But this isn’t the only way I rail against my finitude. My mind won’t work fast enough; I can’t find the right words; I can’t capture the emotion I’m feeling or articulate the thoughts engagingly. I can’t decide what I ought to work on next or how to handle the new problem cropping up in front of me or how to respond with biblical hope when something doesn’t go the way I expected. I’m not strong enough, wise enough, motivated, creative, or loving enough to be anywhere close to the ideal that tantalizingly hangs forever out of reach. From birth to death I am locked in a constant struggle against my own limits.

And all of those limitations find their answer in the Person who has none. Today I take particular hope in God, the Lord of time who has never once double-booked or been held back by a schedule. Several meditations come to mind:

• Looking from the horizon of eternal time in the past, God existed forever in perfect harmony—Father, Son and Spirit. There was no waiting, no anticipation of a better future or aspirational investment to improve His status. He was forever joyful in perfect fellowship and needed nothing.

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