The sun is shining on Princes Street Gardens. The benches are all fully occupied. Children are running around on the grass … And the floral clock is back in position, complete with cuckoo. It must be Summer again.
Edinburgh has something of a fascination about ensuring that we know the time. The one o’clock gun still sends the tourists into a panic at the eponymous hour. Sailors at Leith docks, if there are any left, can look up to Calton Hill to see if the one o’clock time ball has dropped in Nelson’s Monument, while confident that the clock on the Balmoral Hotel will already be indicating five past the hour to ensure that travellers are on time for their train.
The floral clock is particularly interesting though as it also beats out the rhythm of the seasons. Disappearing, as it does, into the Gardiners’ wheelbarrows in autumn only to be carefully planted out again each June.
The phrase ‘telling’ the time with its old fashioned use of the verb ‘to tell’ in the sense of ‘to count’, reminds us that each of us is allotted a finite amount of this stuff. We ‘tell’ it out, minute by minute and year by year. The Bible says, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes”, James 4v14. That is why it is so important to address the really big issues in life while we have time. As the prophet Hosea says, “it is the time to seek the Lord, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you”, Hos. 10 v12.
We should not expect the God of eternity to work to suit our diaries. He has said, “In a favourable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you. Behold, now is the favourable time; behold, now is the day of salvation”, 2 Cor. 6 v2.