I went abroad last spring not expecting much beyond travel. I didn’t expect to fall in love. Nonetheless, I became a passport bro. Her name was Xristina. Our first date we went for coffee and sat so long it turned into drinks, then dinner. Day turned to night before either of us noticed — six hours, gone in what felt like one.
That became the benchmark. Every date after that, six hours minimum, and every one of them felt instant.
This is what presence does to time. When you are fully with someone, caught in the spell of them, time stops functioning the way it normally does. You are not watching the clock because you don’t need to. You are already somewhere better than the next moment.
Eternity gets flattened in modern Christianity. Heaven is clouds and harps. Hell is fire and brimstone. Both feel abstract enough that neither one lands with any real weight.
But the original concept is stranger and more specific than that. The biblical framework for eternity isn’t primarily about duration. It’s about proximity. Heaven is an eternity spent in the presence of God. Hell is an eternity spent away from him. Two states of being, infinitely sustained.
That is the biblical picture of heaven. Not clouds. Not harps. Eternity with God described as an unending moment — the weight of his presence so complete that time doesn’t register the way it usually does. Always happening. Never passing.
I didn’t understand the other side until Egypt.
Mid-semester we traveled to Egypt. Pyramids, camels, Mt. Sinai (apparently some dude named Moses was there). By any measure a trip that should have been the highlight of the semester. Instead the whole week was an agonized wait. All I could think about was getting back on a plane to Thessaloniki.
What should have flown by dragged. Every hour felt like a week. I was physically present at some of the most historically significant sites on earth and emotionally somewhere else entirely, counting minutes until I could leave.
That is the other state. Time stretched. Every second a lifetime. The clock moving and somehow never arriving anywhere.
The person you love fills up parts of yourself you didn’t know were empty. When you leave them — or when they leave you — those parts go empty again. And in their absence, time becomes something you are trapped inside rather than something you move through.
This is what the Bible is describing when it talks about hell. Not fire as punishment. Absence as punishment. An eternity away from the one thing that made time feel like anything other than waiting.
If a week away from a girl in Egypt could feel like an eternity, I can’t imagine what an eternity away from God would feel like.
Eternity is the name.