One Tick at a Time

Today I’m working on Sunday’s sermon. I came across a new resource by Leonard Sweet called Wikiletics, an open source resource for illustrations (or animations as Sweet calls them), sermons, and images. As I read through some of the illustrations for this week, one in particular caught my eye.

Once upon a time, a clock became preoccupied with worry about its
future. It began thinking about the number of times it would have to tick: twice each second, 120 times per minute, 7200 times an hour, 172,800 times a day, 63,072,000 times a year. When it realized that in the next 10 years it would have to tick 630,720,000 times, it had a nervous breakdown. The clock went to the watchmaker for therapy. While under the watchmaker’s care, the clock began to realize that all it needed to do was to tick one tick at a time.

Soon it began to tick again, and it continued ticking, one tick at a
time, for one hundred years.

I’m only about two years into my life as a pastor, and I already look into the future and think about the never ending stream of sermons that I’ll write over the years. If each sermon is roughly two pages single spaced and I only write 45 a year for 30 years, then that is 2,700 pages of material! Watch out Augustine. From that perspective, it is easy to be overwhelmed. That’s why I needed to know about that clock, taking it one tick at a time.