I’m leaving the house a bit too late for my one-hour-and-ten-minutes trip to Essex Automotive to have my car’s AC fixed—and then getting delayed in a road work stretch near Johnson. Darn it! I need to get this done, and they only take wait-for repair jobs if you’re there first thing in the morning; that’s at the stroke of 7:00 AM. First come, first serve—no appointments. If I get there too late, they’ll just have me turn around and come back another day.
Feeling frantic, I start praying the Rosary, asking VatiGod* to let me arrive on time. At this point, that’s near impossible because I only have about 35 minutes left, the garage is another 33 miles away, and I’m taking the scenic route, not the interstate—which means I’m moving through 25 to 50 mph zones.
I pray, “God, I trust you; I know you can do anything. You can work miracles; you can even stretch time if you want to. I’m asking for a miracle right now.”
“Just flow with the traffic,” says the Holy Spirit. “And don’t look at the clock.”
I’m doing my best to keep my eyes off the clock and off my speedometer, as hard and tempting as it is. I’m just flowing along with the other traffic, no slower, no faster, and I continue praying the Rosary, asking for graces for other people, doing a decade of “salvation beads” for enemies and atheists, and pretending there’s absolutely nothing wrong. When I’m done with the Luminous Mysteries—which the Holy Spirit tells me to pray even though I usually don’t—I pray the Surrender Novena and a few rounds of “Jesus, I trust in you; Jesus, I trust in you; Jesus, I trust in you.”
When I finally swoop into the parking lot at the garage, I see a few people sitting on a bench in front. When I try the door to the office (I still haven’t checked the clock in my haste to get out of the car and inside to stake my claim), it is locked.
The woman on the bench says, “They should open any moment now. It’s one minute of seven.”
Wow, VatiGod! You are incredible. Somehow you always come through for me. Thank you so much.
This little miracle makes me think about the phenomenon of time—how it can seemingly stretch and contract. For example, if you’re in a high-adrenaline situation like an accident or some other danger, seconds can stretch into eternities where every sensation is intensely felt and everything is experienced in slow motion. On the other hand, when you’re engrossed in some kind of enjoyable task or just have a fun time, hours can fly by before you know it.
In our science-driven world, this is typically dismissed as totally subjective and not real. It “just seems that way.” But let’s take the religious or philosophical viewpoint for a moment. If time is truly a human construct—or rather, a divine construct created specifically for this material world—but God’s timeless realm, the “Eternal Now,” encompasses everything that has ever happened, is happening right now, and will ever happen, all at once, maybe time itself is malleable, transcendable, and not quite as real as we believe it to be. (Click here to read about my experience with the Eternal Now, as I call it.)
Social media sites like Reddit and paranormal forums are full of reports from people who “lost time” or suddenly found themselves in a different “timeline,” entering stores they later found out hadn’t existed for decades or witnessing mirages of Civil War battle scenes.
One Vermont teacher told me that he once opened a closet in his house and was greeted by a live outdoors scene of farmers and their families in old-fashioned clothes and on horse-drawn wagons bringing in the harvest.
I remember two noteworthy, supposedly true stories I read in a book a long time ago. In the first one, during an overnight stay in a countryside Bed & Breakfast, a man awoke at night to a ghostly view of a bar where men in cowboy hats and gear were drinking whiskey. As he gasped at the scene, the cowboys, in turn, noticed him and looked just as shocked.
The other story was that of a little girl who experienced recurring dreams of a certain house. One day, she and her parents drove through an unfamiliar town, and she screamed for them to stop when she recognized the house from her dreams. They walked up the steps and rang the door bell. When the homeowner opened the door and saw the girl, he went pale and looked like he was going to faint.
“I know this house,” the girl said.
“I know,” the homeowner replied, “because you’re the one who haunts it.”
So even if you take these with a grain of salt, they do make you wonder about the fluidity of what we call “time.” I think God’s world is so much greater than we know or can even imagine.
[*“Vati” means “Daddy” in German and is pronounced “Fuh-tee.”]