Temporal Does Not Mean Small

The plaza fills up after eight because that is when the heat goes out of the stone and the whole square becomes usable again.

There is a man with an accordion who is not very good and who has been playing there for thirty years, which is its own kind of qualification.

He is sixty-two.

Seven years. It is a slow thing and it is going one way and everybody has now been told, which was a relief and then was not.

And at least once a week, from somebody kind, he gets the sentence. It comes in different clothes but it is the same sentence.

This world is not our home. It is all temporary anyway. We are only passing through.

It is true. He believes it. He has said it himself at funerals and meant it.

What he has never said to a soul is what it does to him now that it is being said about his life. Because if it is all temporary, and his particular seven years are inside the temporary, then the whole thing he is going through is a small matter in a short place, and the correct response to a small matter is not to make a fuss about it. So he does not. And the not making a fuss has become the shape of him, and underneath it there is a sentence he has never said out loud, which is: I think what is happening to me does not count.

If somebody has told you that this world is not your home, you know they were being kind, and you know exactly what it did to the size of your own week.

Temporal is a word about clocks

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the seven years, which are doing what they do. It is the standing of them. It costs you the right to consider your own life a serious matter, which sounds like a small loss and is not. It costs the fuss you do not make, which everybody reads as grace and which is actually a man who has concluded he is not entitled to. It costs the plaza, a little, because a week you cannot mention is a week you carry around a square full of people. And it costs you a sentence you have never said, which is the one that actually describes your position.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your seven years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if not counting has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking this square would be no different without you in it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the friend you walk down with, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who come and sit on the stone with you after eight.

Now, Paul, and read the two words he sets against each other, because they are both words about time.

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.2 Corinthians 4:18

Temporal. Eternal.

Both of those are words about duration. Temporal means for a time. Eternal means without end. That is the whole axis Paul is working on, and he is entirely explicit about it: he sets seen against unseen and temporal against eternal, and every term in the sentence is about visibility or about length.

There is no word in that verse about size. Not one. He does not write that the things which are seen are small, or slight, or unimportant, or negligible, and he had all of those words available in Greek and used several of them elsewhere.

You are inside a sentence that measures duration and never once measures worth. Second Corinthians 4:18 sets temporal against eternal and says nothing whatever about magnitude, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a careful word choice and lays it on a square after eight.

Now think about how the two get confused. When somebody says it is all temporary, they mean it as comfort, and the comfort they intend is that this will not last forever. That is a true and good thing to say. But the sentence has a second life once it lands in a man who is inside the temporary, because short and small sit close together in ordinary English, and the person saying it has no idea which one you heard.

You have never been told by Paul that a thing which ends is a thing that does not count. That is written into 2 Corinthians 4:18, and His Spirit in you is the one who keeps a word about clocks from becoming a word about worth.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because seven years of kind sentences have already been said in that square.

It does not tell you the seven years are shortening or lengthening or changing, and it makes no prediction about your body, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not tell you the man who says we are only passing through is wrong. He is right. He is quoting a real Christian conviction and it has carried people through terrible things.

What it does is separate two words that have been welded together in your hearing for seven years. Temporal is about a clock. Nothing in that verse says anything about the weight of what happens on the clock.

You were never asked to conclude that a short thing is a light thing. Scripture puts duration on both sides of the comparison and worth on neither, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries that into a plaza in the evening.