From Jerry Sittser and his book ‘the Will of God as a Way of Life:
In the film Grand Canyon, the Grand Canyon serves as a metaphor for transcendence. In comparison to the Grand Canyon, humans appear to be little specks of matter, with life spans about as long as the tick of a clock. In the movie two strangers converse after they accidentally meet. Simon, a tow-truck driver talks with Mack, a lawyer, about a visit he once took to the Grande Canyon. He was overcome by its hugeness, feeling small and insignificant. “But the thing that got me was sitting on the edge of that big old thing. Those rocks and those cliffs are so old. It took so long for that thing to look like that. . . . When you sit on the edge of that thing you just realize what a joke we people are, what big heads we got thinking that what we do is going to matter all that much, thinking our time here means diddly to those rocks. Just a split second we been here, the whole lot of us. And one of us, that’s a piece of time too small to get a name…. Those rocks are laughing at me. I can tell. Me and my worries, they’re real humorous to that Grand Canyon.
The Power of the Past
Unlike God, we cannot transcend time. We are bound by it. Consider, for example, the power of the past. We cannot change it, though it exercises great influence over us. It affects us as a set of consequences from choices once made that cannot now be reversed. Many of those choices are our own. We choose to marry Elizabeth, to pursue a career in elementary school teaching, to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day.
Each of these choices have consequences that will affect us for the rest of our lives, though we can never be sure how until we actually experience those consequences. We might enjoy sixty years of marital bliss. Then again we might lose a spouse after only eight years of marriage. We might relish every day of a forty-five-year career as an elementary school teacher. Then again, we might start looking at the clock at 10:00 every morning. We might live to the age of ninety-five. Then again, we might die from lung cancer at age forty-two.
I think about the course my life has taken and how weighty my choices have been. It’s staggering to consider the cumulative effect of even one choice, which, once made, is impossible to reverse.
. . . . Much of what happens in life can hinge on a single choice or event, that seems at the time, insignificant. As Richard, the main character in Robert Clark’s novel ‘In the Deep Midwinter’, says to his daughter after a period of bewildering events, “You choose one little thing and everything that follows—maybe for the rest of your life—chooses you.” I wonder what would have happened had I chosen to attend another college. I’ll never know.
. . . .The consequences of our choices are often permanent and irreversible. Lynda and I did not have to have Children. No law required it. We chose to. Our decision was permanent. I cannot trade my children in for other children. They are my children, no matter what I do or what they do. I can choose to be a good father or a bad father; they can choose to be good children or bad children. The choice I make about the kind of father I will be, just as the choice they make about the kind of children they will be, is secondary. We cannot change the fact that I will always be their father and they will always be my children.
. . . .The distant past wields power over us too, We rarely think about how such events have changed our lives—perhaps with good reason, for the very idea is staggering. . . . ~Jerry Sittser, the Will of God as a Way of Life, (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2000, 2004), p.110-112
