From where does time come?  A recently released "heat" map that depicts the universe as it appeared only 370,000 years after the Big Bang, suggests that time began at the point at which space, buried in a sort of indefinable "nothingness," its potentiality nascently at hand, somehow burst forth, spreading the beginnings of the universe across the space it was creating.
     But this does not answer our question.  We're still left with understanding why anything, anything at all ever began to be.  More to the point, we did not create time, we cannot destroy time, we cannot control time.  We only experience it as a function of the space (another, as we pointed out above, mystery) we necessarily occupy.  We have no say about what it and the space which it intrinsically animates ultimately holds.  We are only here, living by perceptions and appearances, our vision clouded by who we are.  In other words, we live by faith, faith in the materiality of our world, faith in the passage of our times, faith in our presence.
     As more than one New Testament writer pointed out, however, living by faith involves more than exercising faith in what is visible.  It also encompasses faith is what is not.  Why?  We simply cannot know truth through appearances alone.
     What we can know about time's origins is that time is merely the outward expression of a greater mystery still, the fullness of whose purposes will ever lie beyond us.  It's not a mystery we can understand through mere appearances.
     On the other hand, it is through appearances that we can come to know it.  Embedded in existence is a fundamental rhythm, a natural flow, that is, things are born, things come to die, things are born in turn.  These are appearances in time, yes, but they are also appearances that communicate to us a most remarkable fact about the world:  it is born in time, it will die in time, but one day, thanks to that most profound of paradoxes--the resurrection appearance, in time, of Easter morning--it will be forever freed of time.
     And on that day, life will really begin.
     So marvel about time, and wonder about its origins; marvel even more, however, that one day time will no longer exist.  The mystery will be complete.