Time

Time stands still for no man.

I say it that way because I am one, and the words fit the bones.
Time stands still for no one — true —
But the clock feels personal when you hear it ticking inside your own chest.

So much life spilled and splashed and evaporated.
Not lost exactly.
Just poured into the cauldron of time, where everything goes eventually.

Throw it in and watch it turn:

School first —
cricket whites, soccer dust,
rugby green grass ground into the knees.
Accolades in soccer, cricket, rugby —
small hands lifting small trophies
to the sound of applause that felt endless.
The field my first stage,
applause my first language.
I learned early how intoxicating it is
to believe the noise will never fade.

Greenside matric:
a boy standing tall
inside the echo of cheers,
stacking applause like promises,
mistaking recognition for permanence,
believing time itself was clapping with me.

Then navy whites.
Salt air stitched into the fabric.
Simon’s Town.
Coxswain.
Oudtshoorn Infantry School.
Boots striking a rhythm,
orders snapping clean in the air.
Another stage.
Another kind of clapping —
discipline, ceremony, approval.
A body drilled into obedience
while the heart rehearsed rebellion in secret.
Uniform bright, future blurred —
disobedience to the cry from above
already visible,
even if I refused to read it.

Then the sudden halt.

A head-on collision.
Six weeks beneath a hospital ceiling
With traction teaching stillness.
No applause there.
Only the quiet hum of machines
and the sound of my own breathing.
Weights hanging from my leg
like a curtain dropping.
The stage empty.
The clapping gone.
And in that silence
a truth louder than any crowd.

And after the stillness, the blade:

HIV at twenty-seven.
A line carved across the calendar.
Before.
After.
No audience now.
No pretending.
Consequence does not clap.
It calls your name.

Because that is the hidden curriculum of a man:
rebellion…
and the slow discovery
that obedience is not a cage —
it is rescue.

All of it boiling now —
trophies, navy whites, hospital rooms, diagnoses —
steam rising from the cauldron of time.

And in the clearing air
the single lesson that survived the heat:

Jesus in my place.

Not repair.
Exchange.

Where disobedience wrote the sentence,
Obedience carried the cross.

Time keeps stirring.
The past does not vanish.
It becomes testimony.

The shock is not the wreckage.
The shock is mercy standing in it
without asking for applause.

And here remains the evidence:

a man corrected,
a man interrupted,
a man still being rebuilt —

not by willpower,
But by substitution.

Jesus in my place.

And the verdict that outlives time itself:

“For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
— Romans 10:13

 

Signing off

Tyrone