The Sting of Goodbye

Sevenink in Singapore

04.26.2007 7:54pm

According to Yahoo Education;

No doubt more than one reader has wondered exactly how goodbye is derived from the phrase "God be with you." To understand this, it is helpful to see earlier forms of the expression, such as God be wy you, god b'w'y, godbwye, god buy' ye, and good-b'wy. The first word of the expression is now good and not God, for good replaced God by analogy with such expressions as good day, perhaps after people no longer had a clear idea of the original sense of the expression. A letter of 1573 written by Gabriel Harvey contains the first recorded use of goodbye: "To requite your gallonde [gallon] of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howdyes," recalling another contraction that is still used.

Wikipedia has the same thing to say about this word, a traditional farewell phrase used in the English language.

This word has always been used primarily to connote leaving something or someone important to your heart. Not to the level of deserting their importance or having no use to them but its just that other elements of life much supreme than you or what you have needs to take its toll as to set in place somehow how the universe should work, and as most of us would agree, the culprit would be, none other than – TIME.

Yes so much have been going on for ages as time sits by his most comfortable corner and in most of time’s capability to laugh at lives missing most of its worth using time in the wrong way you end up in tears. And then unknowingly, time shows off its cruelty by speeding away from you when you most enjoyed it. Time is more supreme than joy, is more powerful than love, time can be peaceful but peace can not over write time.

The most absurd idea you might say from someone who does websites, yes I might live from the age of gigabytes and ones and zeroes. But more than any other living species on this earth I’ve had my share of time’s cruel intentions because I believe nothing could have ever happened without it – without time. How can you find yourself as a thirty year old geek without time passing by? How can you promise someone a future if time won’t pass by and bring that future at your hands? And God would return when? Time will tell right?

And where does that leave us? Are we just accidents waiting to happen? I beg to disagree. Sometimes I think if there’s something next to God in terms of supremacy, it would be time. Time sits someplace near God’s throne so that when we pray for something, God’s answer would come in a package delivered with time.

Even saying goodbye must be in coordination with time cause logically you cant say goodbye to things that time have not yet given you. And who would know if you will find yourself walking the same path again? Of course, time would.

I’ve had the greatest this world has to offer, I’ve had the most profound lifestyle that one could not imagine me having. I’ve been cruelly loved by the most defiant of creatures who wears name tags that read “friends”. Now time dictates that I need to pack my bags to de-synthesize my efforts to build from the ruins of unmet social norms, from the accordions of legalism, from the arc of man’s definitive covenant to survival. All of these I hide in the shadow of history’s most significant piece of wood, to a place not worthy for a King, where one Man ended all humanitarian efforts to unite the creation to the Creator. To where the Savior bid goodbye not to us but to the power of death over us.

You define time whichever way you wish, you call it the most beautiful name you want, pack it in the most expensive cloth or even preserve it in some way but at the end of the day the workflow leads to one single time-table.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 God has made EVERYTHING beautiful in His time. Goodbye has it's sting in my own time but never in God’s.