I don’t love beginning on a sober note, but sometimes that’s the only honest path to something meaningful. Stay with me—it doesn’t end where it starts.
There are truths that quietly, permanently reshape the way you see life. This is one of them.
Years ago, after visiting loved ones who had passed on, I would walk through a cemetery and read the tombstones. One detail was always the same: two dates, a birth and a death, separated by a small hyphen. That little line began to haunt me.
Every person who has ever lived has lived inside that hyphen.
Every joy and every sorrow. Every victory, every failure, every prayer whispered and every tear shed. The entire human experience is compressed into that small line between two dates. Some hyphens stretch long; others end far too soon. But every one of them is finite.
And then there’s sonder—the realization that every stranger you see has an inner life just as vivid and complex as your own. As real as my memories and emotions are to me, theirs were just as real to them. Yet when I stand before a tombstone, all of that depth—love, fear, laughter, regret—is reduced to a hyphen. I have no idea who they were. Just a line between two dates.
From Genesis 1 until now, there has always been the cycle of time: “the evening and the morning were the first day.” And so it has been ever since. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1).
There was a season in my life when my biggest worry was whether dinner would be beans or jollof rice. Now my concerns are heavier, more complex. Time has a way of doing that.
Time itself is a strange thing. When did it actually begin? When did the first shadow move across the ground? When did the sand in the hourglass start to fall? When did the clock begin to tick?
John 1:1 — In the beginning was the Word.
“The beginning” refers to that precise moment on the number line when time started counting. If you could build a time machine and travel backward as far as possible, you would reach that point—and no further. And when you arrived, you would find that God was already there.
And if you traveled forward to the farthest possible future, to the end of time itself, you would discover the same truth: God is already there.
For God, there are no dates flanking the line, just have the hyphen. And even that image falls short, because God is not bound by time at all. Every event that has ever occurred in the universe has happened within time’s number line. God exists outside of it.
“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8).
Try, for a moment, to think beyond time. What would that even be like?
We struggle with this because we are creatures of time. We measure life in years, distance in hours, and even speak of God as existing in “eternity past”—though “past” itself is a time-bound word. Still, Scripture tells us this much: before time existed, God is.
Jesus hints at that eternal reality in John 17:5:
“And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” Before creation, before time, the Godhead existed in perfect unity and glory. Our time-bound minds cannot fully grasp what that means.
And then something astonishing happened.
When the Word became flesh, God did not merely step into His creation—He stepped into time itself.
“But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law” (Galatians 4:4).
The God who exists outside the number line looked at a single moment within it and declared, This is the fullness of time. And then He entered it.
In His humanity, the eternal Son received a birthdate—though He had existed forever. He accepted a death date—though death could not hold Him. The timeless One subjected Himself to seasons, to waiting, to hunger and weariness, to joy and grief.
He experienced betrayal and sorrow, suffering and death—and then resurrection. He knew the weeping that endures for the night and the joy that comes in the morning. The eternal Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, lived the entire human story inside the hyphen.
Why does this matter?
Two verses tell us why.
First, “For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6).
The Eternal One entered time to redeem those bound by it.
Second, “For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:15–16).
He experienced the full ebb and flow of human life so that, when we suffer within our hyphen, we do not suffer alone.
He who had no beginning accepted a birth.
He who could not die accepted death.
So that those of us bound by time might live forever.
What a God we serve.
What a God we serve.
Kanayo Ikeh 