One of the vivid memories floating around in my head from various movies is of a character walking into a clock shop and hearing all of the clocks ticking. They had different sounds, and it reminded me of a concert orchestra. They all looked different, and that reminded me of a busy city street at noon when all kinds of people fill the sidewalks.

My wife has an alarm clock that has a distinctive tick-tock sound. Sometimes I am half asleep, half awake, and it brings my thoughts to centre. When I hear it, it seems like it must be six feet tall, made of elegant wood, and have a lazy swinging pendulum. Its leisurely pace seems so easy. It sounds like a seasoned gentleman with age in his voice. Yet, that clock is a simple little thing; when you see it, it looks like something you can wind up and hold in one hand.

At 12.34 yesterday, my watch stopped. I didn't notice it at the time. So, the hours went by until the Super Bowl was on. Near the end of that game, I was sitting on the couch, my wife had fallen asleep with her head resting against me, and I looked at my watch.

It was 12.30 already and going on to one in the morning! How could that be?

It hadn't felt like that game was taking that long. Was this just a case of time going fast when one is having fun? A bit later, I checked it again, and time had stood still. Huh? Of course. It was the instrument I used to tell time, and not my internal clock or the actual passage of time that had malfunctioned in some way.

Time is a measure of the sequence of events. It is considered to be one of the fundamental constituents of existence, and it's used to measure and otherwise consider other objects and their relationships. It's used to measure the interval, or distance, between locations. People use it to measure the motion of things. One of the central questions on an IQ test asks how long it will take a person to walk a designated distance at a designated pace. Time binds us in its relentless progress.

It denies us the chance to actually re-do something we wish we had done differently. It keeps us from moving as quickly as we might like to some anticipated goal. While time itself, being part of the fundamental structures of the universe (along with space and number), may not actually be capable of measurement, it measures every one of us.

One of the ways in which we distinguish between infinite and finite experience is with this business of time. We think of infinity as time that never ends, but that is not really an accurate way to think of it. Infinity means having no limits; it is not just time that goes on forever, because time is a limit. Being infinite means existing for all time at the same time; another way of thinking of it is not being bound by time at all, and that would require that an infinite being would transcend the elemental structures of the universe.

An infinite God, then, would not be limited by sequence, space, or number. In fact, such constructs would not even apply, giving more meaning to what God says through the prophet Isaiah: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8,9)

When it comes to the doctrine of the trinity, then, number does not apply for God, and the doctrine itself is the best finite creatures can come up with in understanding the number of persons the single God is over the passing of time, as described in scripture. God can be both Father and Son and Holy Spirit at the same time.

"How can that be?" one might ask. Indeed. How can it be that light bends and time warps over long distances as light travels across deep space? How can it be that when we observe a cosmological event in some neighbouring solar system, that it actually took place thousands of light years in the past?

For us it takes place when we observe it, but what we experience has actually come and gone before we get to it. How can that be? Does the event itself just keep on happening as the light of it travels away? In a sense it does. So, if such an amazing thing can be true of beings confined by their finitude to the sequence of events, how much more amazing are the "ways" of a Being not confined by finitude at all?