Time, Dogs, Us and God

There was a time when the ever-gluttonous Conspiracy Meow! logo dog—real name Mrs. Kara Sparkles—was being her usual anti-diet self and demanding that I give her all the treats she could stuff into her tiny face. In an effort to prevent my chubby little canine friend from suffering the ill effects of obesity, I made her wait until her scheduled mealtime to eat.

During this terrible period of deprivation, my little doggy was extremely annoyed with me for refusing to give in to her treat-seeking demands. As she stared at me in apparent disbelief over my cruelty, I started wondering why she was so insistent.

Then something occurred to me. From my perspective, I was only making her wait until dinner. But Sparkles will probably experience only a fraction of the time on Earth that I will. Could those few hours somehow feel much longer to her than they do to me? If her perception of waiting were proportional to her much shorter lifespan, perhaps my four-hour delay felt more like forty hours to her.

That thought made me consider how often I have become overly focused on time in my own life. More than once, I’ve waited impatiently for something to happen and felt disappointed when the result didn’t come to fruition as quickly as I wanted.

Which brings me, naturally, from a Chihuahua demanding snacks to the nature of God.

Specifically, what might this idea mean for Christians who feel as though their prayers have gone unanswered for too long?

Please keep in mind that this is only a lighthearted thought experiment. It isn’t intended to disrespect anyone’s religious beliefs. With that established, let’s dive into the question of why God isn’t returning your calls.

If God is all-knowing and has always existed, the difference in our perception of time could theoretically create an even greater disconnect between God and his human creations. In the case of Sparkles, if she waits four hours for a treat, could that somehow be the experiential equivalent of forty hours to her? It’s obviously not a scientific calculation, but it raises an interesting question about whether creatures with radically different lifespans might experience waiting differently.

Apply the same thought experiment to prayer. If God is the one answering prayers, how quickly would he need to act for his response to seem prompt to a human being? Would the passage of time mean the same thing to the person asking for help as it would to an eternal being?

If lifespan really did affect the perception of time in this way, the difference between humans and God would be almost incomprehensible. A human lifetime would be a flash in the pan compared with eternity. From that perspective, what seemed like an immediate response to God might not arrive within the lifetime of the person praying—or even within the lifetimes of their children.

Of course, this theory has some enormous holes in it, beginning with the question of whether God experiences time anything like humans or dogs do. There is also the question of whether God can manipulate time—or exists outside of it altogether. If God is not constrained by time, then the entire lifespan disconnect becomes irrelevant. If he is constrained by time in some fashion, however, things get considerably more interesting.

And if God experiences eternity while humans experience only decades, perhaps the celestial customer-service department has a very different definition of “prompt.”

So I’ll leave this one to the Christians of the world to set me straight: Can God answer prayers promptly relative to human time? And if so, how does the Almighty bridge the enormous difference between our experience of time and his?

Sparkles, meanwhile, would simply like her dinner.