day no. 15,453: learning how to read eternity

"While civilization was reading the Times, he was reading the eternities." -- Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life

1 Chronicles 12:32
And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do

If you want to understand the times in which God has placed you (Acts 17:26), you need to understand the world into which you've been placed. The times you live in were not the first times. They are downstream from the source. So we need to know where we came from, what it was meant to be like, what went wrong and how that happened, what's been happening since, how we got here, and what we're supposed to do about.

People obsessed with their own peculiar cultural moment cannot understand even the moment they're in -- the harder they stare at it, the less of it they see. To understand the present times, you have to understand how they were produced by times passed by and where they are all headed at time's end. 

Eternity informs the way you read your times. If you don't know how to read eternity, you don't know how to translate your days. It is the functional equivalent of being temporally illiterate. You can make out shapes and familiar sounds, but you can't read.