Children of Time

Children of Time Communion Meditation from October 2026 by Jeff Drury

I had the opportunity to travel some over the past week.

When I was a kid, one of the things I remember about traveling was sending postcards home. You’d stop at a gift shop and find postcards with pictures of famous places, beautiful scenery, or something ridiculous like the world’s largest ball of twine.

You don’t see many postcards anymore. We’ve moved on from postcards to instant pictures, social media, and livestreams. We don’t have to wait until we get home to tell everyone what we’ve seen. We can show the world almost immediately.

And maybe that’s a good metaphor for the world we live in.

We live in a world that is constantly showing us something.

Every day there is another headline, another crisis, another political fight, another scientific discovery, another thing we’re supposed to be afraid of, another thing we’re supposed to be outraged about.

And we can begin to believe that because something is happening right now, it must be the most important thing.

But the church has always had to remember the difference between what is temporary and what is eternal.

There’s an old line that says, “The eternal concern of the church should not be swallowed up by the temporal concerns of the state.”

That’s a good reminder for us—not just about current affairs, but about life.

Because the world is always going to have something for us to worry about.

There will always be another headline.

Another election.

Another controversy.

Another discovery that challenges something we thought we understood.

Another reason to be afraid.

Human beings have always struggled with this.

There’s a song by The Choir called Children of Time that captures some of that struggle. It talks about Columbus sailing across the sea and troubling our theology. It talks about cosmonauts being the first in space to look for God and find no trace.  It talks about where is heaven if the world is round. 

It’s really a song about human beings discovering that the universe is much bigger and stranger than we imagined.

And perhaps that’s where the song becomes particularly relevant to faith.

Because eventually we have to admit that we are not as big as we sometimes think we are.

We are children of time.

We are limited creatures trying to understand an unlimited God.

We are people who see a tiny piece of the picture and sometimes mistake it for the whole thing.

The song ends with the line:

“Father, have merciful eyes for the children of time.”

I think that’s a fitting connection for communion.

Because communion is not a celebration of how much we understand.

It’s not a reward for having our theology perfectly figured out.

It’s not a declaration that we’ve successfully made sense of the world.

It’s a reminder that we are children of time.

And that we need mercy.

We come to this table carrying all the things that have occupied our attention this week—the headlines, the arguments, the fears, the questions, the things we understand and the things we don’t.

And Jesus meets us here.

Not with another argument.

Not with another headline.

Not even with an explanation for everything.

But with bread.

And with a cup.

And with a reminder:

This is my body.
This is my blood.
Do this in remembrance of me.

The world will continue to change.

Our understanding will continue to be lacking.

There will always be new things to discover, new things to debate, and new things that challenge what we thought we knew.

But the eternal remains.

Christ remains.

Grace remains.

And the invitation remains:

Come to the table.

Remember Christ.

Receive mercy.

And trust the God who sees the whole picture, even when we can only see a postcard.

Amen.