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Timing is everything in our focused world . a friend of mine just hinted that , if her
parents were coming to a special event of hers , she would need to be prepared to
accommodate them. To which she was told that all that would be needed was to
have the room ready needed or not.
This is the way that we organize our lives, we will try to the utmost of our ability to
keep a meeting time, or appointment, and if we are even five minutes late we will
usually be contrite in our apology, even if the lateness is beyond our control.
This is a world that has lost, abandoned, any flexibility for personal or crisis
intervention. Even now as I have b een writing this a friend called up online. Rather
than give the time that might have been needed to discuss the project directly, I
begged off until after my blog deadline, sorry K I did keep your comment though.
Historian Geoffrey Blainey once wrote a book on Australian History called ³The
Tyranny of Distance.´ I suggest that we now live in a society that is ruled by, among
other things, the Tyranny of Timing. it really doesn¶t matter if there are extenuating
circumstances in our lives, we are measured by the promptness by which we do
what we said we would.
Look at the technology that we have available to us today. Mobile phones are a
blessing, in that they enable us to readdress some of the imbalance imposed by the
Tyranny of Timing. When a human need c rops up in our lives whether it be of our
making, or another¶s, we are able to ³reschedule´ or make other arrangements.
Admittedly the obverse of the coin is also true that the mobile seems to have the
uncanny knack of tracking us down at the most inapprop riate times, unless we learn
to control it.
In just the same way as we must control the mobile, so it is that we must learn to
control the tyranny of time. Otherwise we stand the very real possibility of time
affecting our health through stress and related diseases.
Followers of Jesus have a deeper reason for taking back the freedoms that the
tyranny of time tries to rob us of. The Gospels have many accounts of Jesus turning
to the side when those around Him seemed to think He was being, to put it in a
modern idiom, ³weird´. The woman with the issue of blood, whose greatest hope was
that she might touch His hem so that she might be healed , is a good example of this.
Logically the disciples were right, He would have been in the middle of a mob with
people brushing Him on all sides, but He felt this was different and it was.

Today we as His followers need the same empathy to counter the demands of the tyranny
of time. We must differentiate between people need and clock demands. After all the
Master came to: ͞Y

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