It’s February 1st, 1998, and you’ve just been born.  Your family gathers around you, doting over you with immeasurable glee.  They love you very much, though not nearly as much as I do.  They play with your hands - hands tiny and intricate, like the inner-workings of a clock - seeing them only as they are.  I see them as what they will become: a boy’s hands, rough and calloused from hours of pole vault practice; a man’s hands, soft and gentle from a white-collar lifestyle; a grandfather’s hands, leathered and worn from a long and weary life.  I see all these things, because I am the clockmaker.  

Your parents give you the name Matthew.  It means “gift of the Lord.” 

It’s September 3rd, 2003 - your first day of kindergarten.  You clutch tightly to your mother’s hand, scared to let go. I wish you could know, like I do, that everything is going to be all right, that you’re going to love school and excel in your studies.  But I cannot show you these things now.  I must let you learn them in your own time. 

It’s September 26th, 2014, and I see a smile spread across your face as you and that cute girl from the tennis team hold hands for the first time.  I feel overjoyed, because I’m watching the two of you fall in love.  But I feel great sorrow as well, because I can also see the day when the two of you say tearful goodbyes to one another. 

It’s October 14th, 2014, and you’re storming off the tennis court after a devastating loss in the regional quarterfinals.  When you get in the car, you slam your hands against the steering wheel and call out my name in anger.  Tears stream down your cheeks like rivers as you ask me why you fail at everything.  I wish that I could comfort you with the fact that, a year later, you're walking away from your quarterfinal match victorious.

It’s September 15th, 2015, and you’re in a shouting match with your mother.  She pulls the car over to the side of the road.  She threatens to make you find your own way home.  You clench your hands into fists and stare at her defiantly, unwilling to admit that you’re wrong. 

It’s 33 AD, and the Romans stare at me defiantly as they drive the nails through my hands.  I’m being punished for the disrespect you’re showing your mother on September 15th, as well as the uncountable amount of other sins that you’re committing during your lifetime.  As they hang me to die amongst criminals, I know you don’t deserve the salvation I’m earning for you.  I see you cheating on homework assignments, see you needlessly bringing down that girl you profess to love, see you taking out your anger and frustration on others who don’t deserve it.

But despite all of this, I love you.  I love you more than all those family members playing with your newborn hands in 1998.  I love you because I am the clockmaker, and I see your past, present and future.

 
It’s the day you die.  As you enter into my Kingdom, I greet you warmly and wrap my arms around you.  You ask me if I watched over you, if I was there to witness your greatest triumphs and deepest failures.  I take your hands in mine and smile.