Today is one day shy of marking a year since my last blog posting - which brings to mind the question of time and how we perceive it's passing.

When I was a child, I was raised by my grandparents. Not an exceptionally unusual experience for sure, but enough to make a unique mark in how I perceive time. I often heard from both of my grandparents how rapidly time seems to pass by. Years go by so quickly to them that they would often ask the question, "What happened to this year, it went by so quickly?"

This concept, this perception, fell on deaf ears as I laboriously waited out the extremely dull and boring years of my life as a High School student. Ugh! Time to me seemed to drag on and on and on with no end in sight in those days! Yes, there were memorable and enjoyable experiences as well (winning the Junior Olympic High Jump Championship, going out with lovely Sharon, getting and enjoying my first car, etc.) but overall I did not perceive time as passing quickly - on the contrary - it passed by so slowly as to be mentally painful to me at times!

Time passed by and events in my life occurred as they were meant to unfold - graduation, a brief stint in college, the first job, the second, and so forth ... marriage, fatherhood. Stop right there!

I remember holding my tiny infant daughter (Rachael) on my shoulder one night as her mother (Pam) and her older brother (Michael) slept. It was late at night and very quiet as I rocked her to sleep and pondered what my grandparents were telling me...

I began to notice that what they expressed to me had some kernel of truth to it (!) since I was somewhat wondering how quickly I went from being a single man to a married man with children. The time between the moment I had met her mother to the present moment, rocking Rachael to sleep, seemed to go by in a blur so quickly that I hardly could believe it.

I thought about her older brother, Michael, who was now a precocious two year old. I thought about the fact that although one year to me was a mere 1/28 of my life, that same one year was to him 1/2 of his life! And as anyone who knows the very basics of rational number theory, 1/2 is a significantly larger amount than 1/28! Hmmm...

If we judge the passage of time based on our life's experience, then no wonder it seems like the passing of time seems to accelerate as we get older. Perhaps there really is a fundamental and Mathematically reasonable basis to my grandparent's often-heard complaint?

As I continued to rock my infant baby girl to sleep (as of the writing of this post, she's a 25-year old Married woman) I was also thinking about how this inversely-proportional relationship between age and the velocity of time's passing fits so perfectly some of the insights that we gain about "God" from the Bible. For instance,

"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." - II Peter 3:8

The former expression showing a different insight into how God perceives time (perhaps being "above it" in some metaphysical sense) but the latter expression fitting the reciprocal nature of time's passing acceleration perfectly when considering that God is "ageless" - a thousand years to us is an inconceivably long period of time encompassing thirty or forty generations or so, but to the ageless one, the I AM, it can pass as if it were only one day.

What is the significance of this to a blog post about an interesting episode of the Twilight Zone?

Well, Romney seemed to value some things (his Bible and his integrity) more than he did his own life - "in the flesh", per say.

For the moment, he was a lowly caterpillar living a short, miserable existence in a totalitarian state - dreaming of the time when he will leave behind this state of existence, trading in the "caterpillar" state for that of a "butterfly" - where he will experience a freedom such as he had never known to exist. It was a freedom that was explicitly promised to him by the Words of the Bible and that he whole-heartedly agreed with!

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. " - John 8:32

Isn't it amazing how there are lessons in nature (metamorphosis, for example) that express to us Spiritual Truths that if we only open our eyes to see them, we can?