Filling up the Pool

I don't often mention during my blogging that I feel I am a
fairly spiritual and God-seeking Christian. I try to be a good
Catholic boy, and look forward to spending eternity with God.

But that discussion is for another time and another place,
that is not what this blog is about. However, since God is
a big part of my life, I may occasionally blog about religious
themes.

So with that in mind, I would like to discuss Eternity. Whether
you consider yourself to be religious or not, it is still
fascinating to try to understand what Eternity may be like.

Eternity means 'timeless'. No beginning, and no end. Since we
humans are on the earth for a finite period of time, we can only
relate to things that are finite. The concept of Forever in
the actual, literal sense is something that we just don't have
the ability to comprehend.

It may be possible for us to conceive of 'A Very Long Period
of Time', but even that is difficult (at least, for me it is).
A very long period of time is still not the same as Eternity.

For example, we are told that the earth has been around for a
few billion years. I guess my little pea-brain is able to
comprehend a million of something if I break it down:

A thousand, that's a do-able number. Easy enough, then, to
imagine one hundred thousand. We deal with numbers like this in
our daily life all the time. So if I can grasp one hundred
thousand, I only have to take ten of those to get to a million.

But to go much bigger than that, it starts to get pretty
intense. They say that the dinosaurs have been gone for about
200 million years. Now we are getting into some serious time.

Pretty amazing to think of a dinosaur leaving a footprint in
some mud, and then the print just sits there...undisturbed for
however long it takes to harden and turn into rock, just waiting
for someone to come along and uncover it.

Can you imagine leaving one of your footprints somewhere, and
there it remains for someone to find in the future, millions
of years from now? Can you now handle going into the billions,
and TRILLIONS?

But you know, as big as these numbers are, they are still
finite. We still can't compare that with eternity, no matter
how hard we try.

Think of this...let's say we have an Olympic size swimming pool.
We are now going to take an eyedropper, and place one drop of
water into the empty pool. We'll assume that the drop of water
will fall into it and stay there, it won't evaporate or
otherwise disappear. And we go away for a year.

Next year, we come back, and place another drop of water in the
pool. Then, next year, we will do the same. Can you see where
this is going? Eventually, if you add one drop per YEAR...you
will fill up the pool. And however long that takes, eternity is
still longer.

Okay, I did some research, and I found that a gallon of water
contains 90,840 drops (yes, a drop of water is a specific size,
determined by how many water molecules can bind together in a
single coherent mass before falling apart due to their own weight).

I also found that an Olympic swimming pool of the size:
164 ft. x 82 ft. x 6 ft. deep
will hold 600,000 gallons of water.
By my calculations, that would be 54,504,000,000 drops of water.

So if you were very patient, and only added one drop per year,
it would take you fifty-four trillion, five-hundred and four
million years to fill the pool.

This is not even a blink of an eye compared to eternity.
In fact, when you are in eternity, and have filled up the
pool, you will let another 54 trillion years go by, and STILL
you continue on living.

Now, I don't know about you, but I am not jacking with my
eternal soul...I want to spend MY eternity with God.

Peace be with you.