Food for our Minds and Spirits: The Vulnerability of Time

I really love the movie Creed. Creed III is in theaters now, but the original is my favorite. It’s one of my favorite pieces of our nostalgia-throwback-sequalized-remake movie culture. It’s a great new story that taps into the themes and dynamics of an older story. When the main character, Adonis Creed, asks the much older Rocky Balboa about his dad and what defeated him, Rocky has some profound words: “Time takes everybody out; time’s undefeated.”

I think our basic vulnerability to time is part of why vulnerability is an inescapable part of life. Even if we maintained the illusion of control––even if we were royalty or emperors––no one can escape the passage of time.

That is part of what shapes our spiritual lives, the experience of things that are part of our experience, even part of reality, that constrains and shapes who we are. Because we are vulnerable to time, it makes us care about our elders in a certain way, it makes us hope in our children and family in a certain way. It may make us more empathetic, or it could shape us into power-hungry tyrants who need to carve our image in stone to cope with how vulnerable we feel.

Of course, it also makes us realize that our experiences are not unique to us! We experience time, but so do our friends, families, neighbors and strangers. Because, as Rocky taught us, time takes everybody out. Sometimes we get to be universalists of hope and universalists of justice. But sometimes we are universalists of vulnerability.

Thinking about our inescapable vulnerability to time made me think of a real experience of time––when I was a kid I think it was a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records that showed “the longest limo in the world.” I remember seeing the picture and marveling at how ridiculous it was to have a helicopter pad on a car.

Rich people being ridiculous in public was a bit more novel in the early 1990’s. So it was kind of a shocker when I saw the image again, for the first time since I was a kid, along with a photo of its dilapidated state. It’s a monumental object lesson to our vulnerability to time.

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

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Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD