The Chapter Before Chapter One

I’m not a human as you may perceive me to be. I am an angel of the Lord Almighty—a messenger if you will. I thought it best to explain the concepts of the stories you are about to read. Being a human, you are indelibly bound by a thing called time. Your whole existence circulates around a clock. You cross days off a calendar and celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. One twenty-four-hour day passes the same as the one before, and the same as the one tomorrow. I must confess, I never fully understood time. Life, as you know it, is frozen, and you live in trickling drips. It’s mind-boggling. For the rest of infinity, time does not exist. In all heaven, the Lord Almighty and the angels do not live wrapped up in such a pesky construct as time. All the events happening in your sifting hourglass look utterly different to us timeless creatures. Past, present, and future are non-existent. Everything is happening at once—but in the beautiful harmony of a music box with all the gears working together to make a marvelous melody. Hmm, how to explain? This may not be something a time-bound human, such as yourself, will be able to understand, but I'll put it like this: when you were younger, a year felt so much longer than it does to you now. Am I correct? Christmas took forever to arrive, and birthdays seemed an eternity apart. This is because a year represented a large part of your young life. For example, when you reached your first birthday, one year equals the whole of your life, but when you turned five one year is now one-fifth of your life. By the time you are twenty you are beginning to say things like, “I can’t believe it's Christmas time already!” and “How has it been four years since I was sixteen?” Soon you’ve turned eighty and a year has become a small fraction of your life, and the time between Christmases seems shorter and the days go faster, and you are on the brink of understanding what it means to be outside of time. Take this logic and apply it to the Lord Almighty. He has no beginning or end. The years stretch out unending in either direction—the fraction vanishes! A single year loses all significance when lined up in eternity. Time disappears. This book aims to give you a glimpse of life on earth from that timeless perspective. Though it may be nigh impossible unless you read every chapter at once, which of course you cannot. Although, from your perspective, these events have hundreds of years between them (I still struggle to comprehend this concept), can you imagine that the events of this book are taking place together? Imagine this book is a stage set with different rooms on it. Each of the rooms is open facing the audience. In each room, a separate play is going on. One light is shining down into the last room on stage left. All the other rooms are in darkness save for any bit of light that escapes and brightens the shadows. If you watch, you will find that the plays in the rooms are disconnected. To the audience, it looks chaotic and noisy, and it's hard to tell what is going on. But, my friend, you will soon find that each act will work together to compose a song written long before human time ever began—written by a Composer who was more than capable to bridge the gap between the supernatural world of timelessness and the human world of time.