Our granddaughter Abi can't stand the sound; says it keeps her awake. So every time she spends the night, the clock in the Millstone Room comes down from its place on the wall to be laid on the kitchen counter till morning. I can barely hear it; after all, it's a battery operated electric with a barely audible 'tick tock." Apparently, her hearing is much better than mine, but we obviously belong to different worlds when it comes to timepieces. The rhythmic ticking of an old-fashioned mechanical clock is soothing and comforting to me, music to my ears. Not so much to my granddaughter.
Hanging on a wall in our living room is a century old schoolhouse clock that hung silently in my father in law's den for years. When he died, gram gave it to me, and I immediately took it to a clock repairman in Ohio for a cleaning and rebuild. A month or so later, I picked it up and hung it in the corner, a safe distance from the heat of the fireplace, where it faithfully tick-tocked away till one day, it just quit. I opened the door to the pendulum to find it laying on the bottom. The wire holding it had broken its soldering. It hung silent till today, when I had a few minutes extra time and decided to tackle the project. Actually, I had tried a few days ago, but couldn't figure out how to pry off the hands so I could remove the face and access the works. A phone call to the repairman gave me the information I needed, and five minutes later, the works lay exposed to view.
The wire had been soldered to a thin, flexible band that was wedged into a slotted key. I pried off the band, took it and the wire out to the kitchen and laid it on Linda's glass chopping board where I soldered the two back together again. Ten minutes' work, and we were ready to reassemble the works, which I did in short order. A steady tick-tock is rewarding me from the corner, adding to the antique cast clock's melody coming from the top of the secretary against the adjoining wall.
I love old clocks. A stately grandfather clock is in the garage awaiting my attention. Hopefully, by spring it will join the others, adding to the gentle cacophony of quiet sound soothing my soul.
Time is a funny thing. The Scriptures tell us that God is above and beyond it; eternal, and that we are moving through time to when "time shall be no more." I can't imagine it. The life we know is measured in millennia, centuries, decades, years, seasons, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. With the advent of atomic clocks, it is broken down even further. But it is all a human construct. God isn't limited by it as we are; he has, as it were, "all the time in the world," but for us, there is a time for every season under heaven, and an opportune time to be saved.
The older I get, the more aware I am of this thing we call time. I am less willing to waste it on frivolity, more concerned with squeezing every drop of life out of every second I have been given, knowing that as far as human time is concerned, there is more of it behind me than ahead of me. The clocks on my wall and on top of various cabinets and shelves are subtle and faithful reminders of this gift I hold. I owe them my gratitude. It's easy to grow deaf to their ticking, but in so doing, time slips away, never to return. At the beginning of this new year, I am grateful for these old clocks, for their steady, soft noise that reminds me of the chronology I occupy, and of the eternal significance of that which will one day be no more.
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