The Miracle of Time

I don’t think I’ve ever been called a “techie.” Although I’ve spent most of my career in Sales and Product Management for technology companies, I still prefer a shovel in my hand to a cell phone. Like many people, however, I am consistently amazed at the technology that has been developed over the last 15 years or so. One of my favorites is Google Earth.

It is amazing to me that I can sit in bed with my laptop and peer down at my own house in a photo taken from a satellite orbiting miles above the earth. Then, with a few clicks on the keyboard, I can jump over to my favorite beach on Maui or my childhood home in Portland, Oregon. It is absolutely incredible!

So it has been with some techie-like anticipation that I have been waiting almost three years for Google to update the photo of my property.

Two years ago we built a new house on our little farm in Northern Utah. It replaced the manufactured home that was on the property when we bought it back in 2004. Once we moved into the new house, built just a few steps to the west of the existing home, the little double-wide was ingloriously cut open like a trout and hauled away in two pieces to take on its new calling as a cabin in the mountains of Wyoming. I do not miss it and neither, it seems, does Google.

Two weeks ago I pulled up Google Earth and clicked on our address. To my delight I zoomed in and found an updated photo of our property that includes the new house. Even more delightful was the fact that I could tell from the picture the day on which it was taken – June 18th, 2010.

Take a look. See the green truck with a red trailer parked in the driveway just south of the garden. That truck and trailer were only parked in my driveway on June 18th. It was the day I hauled goats to the fairgrounds for our annual Utah Dairy Goat Association goat show. The only other time the trailer was attached to the truck in my driveway was at night on the 19th, and clearly it is very much daytime in the photo.

Neat, huh?

But as I looked further, I found something even more interesting. The vegetable garden (that big patch of dirt with some faintly visible rows and mounds in the lower left of the photo) was still almost entirely bare in the picture. But how could this be? I had been watering the garden and pulling weeds earlier in the day and it looked nothing like that.

The day I found the new picture on Google Earth was just over four weeks from the day it was taken. By the time I saw the photo, I had already cut Swiss chard once and it was growing a second crop. The corn had tassels and was as tall as I am, the sunflowers even taller. Tomatoes and squash were setting fruit. The Zucchini was tumbling out of the garden as if off a production line. How was it possible that four weeks earlier the garden was almost bare? It took me a few minutes to justify the picture taken just a few weeks before with the current state of the garden.

Then it settled on my mind. It was simple. It was the miracle of time. When comparing the picture with the actual garden, the change seemed miraculous. In the same way you are amazed at the change when you run into someone who was years younger the last time you saw them, I just couldn’t quite believe how the garden had changed in the four weeks since the photo was taken.

If I were to take a sunflower seed and place it in the dirt on a Friday night, would you believe me if I told you that by the next morning it had grown to be a plant of 7 feet tall? Of course not. So why does it not amaze us that the exact same thing happens, but just takes a little longer, as a matter of fact?

A broken arm healed in an instant is an unexplainable miracle. A broken arm healed in 8 weeks is . . . well . . . it just is. A boy grown to be a man overnight a la the movie Big is Hollywood fiction. If it happens over ten years, we don’t think to be amazed. You get the idea.

Take time out of the equation, and you often get what we can only call miracles.

So be patient. Wounds will heal. Pain will subside. Troubles will pass. Things will change in miraculous ways – with the passing of time.