On Learning to Love the Time We Are In
Or at least not hating it
After I married at 19, I cried when I thought about my husband’s death. At random moments, I was overcome with an abject terror of a car accident, disease, or other tragedy that would take him from me.
“I’m not going to die,” he would say with bewilderment at the strength of my anticipatory grief. He wasn’t much comfort. Of course he was going to die. We all were.
Most young adults I’ve known are not overcome by grief at the thought of a loved one’s death, nor do they seem to dwell on these possible scenarios. My own seemingly immortal children turn up their noses at death-related subjects like they are ugly sweaters at a thrift store.
Twenty-eight years after my wedding, I can only guess at why death made such an impression on my younger self. Four years before I married, a family friend (a father and husband) lost control of his car on an icy stretch of roadway while doing his teen-aged son’s school drop-off. The man died. His son survived, barely. A year later, a friend and coworker died by suicide, three months after his own wedding day. I didn’t understand then how death by suicide breaks limbs in us that never fully set straight. All I knew was a shattering so severe that it limited my ability to perceive or understand all that happened afterward—the deterioration of my mental and physical health and constant, plaguing thoughts of death for the rest of my junior year of high school.
I was a Christian, for whom death should, technically, not sting. Or so I was told.1 Instead, death created a festering gash in my person. The idea of resurrection amounted only to, as Christian Wiman writes, “a fiction and a distraction;” I didn’t understand that “to see…despair clearly is the first step to being out of it.”2 I was seeing through a fog, and continued to do so as death reprised its part in every act of my story: miscarriages, a brother—suddenly and violently in his thirties, grandparents, and even an aging father whose gray hair reminds me our days are indeed numbered.
What I’ve come to realize, however, is that it wasn’t just death I hated. It was Time. Time that could not be unwound or undone. A past that could not be gone back to. Relationships that could not be reconciled on this side of heaven, or so it seemed. Days, weeks, and years of aging bodies and dimming minds. I’ve hated Time with so much vengeance and, it turns out, so much pride.
“To resent mortality is a mark of hubris. When we resent our own mortality, we resent the fact that what is given is not eternal.”3 James K.A. Smith’s How to Inhabit Time caught me off guard, reminding me that just as I’ve always been a created being, so is Time God’s creation. A gift, in fact. A vehicle through which God chooses to allow us mortals to encounter eternity. God enters Time by his Spirit, speaking in dreams and whispers as we alternate between sleep and waking. God providentially arranges circumstances on some days, is (apparently) silent on others, and entered history (Time) by donning flesh and blood that looks like ours.
To claim Time as a gift seems all wrong, and yet it is the holy how of God’s choosing to reveal himself to us—in seasons of youth, middle years, and final chapters. And even then, when “our” Time comes, we are not done with Time. We Christians anticipate another Time—for resurrection and redemption. It could be that, all these years, my weeping was simply a longing for new creation.
But even if this is the case, Smith cautions that while we may know the end of the story, it’s important we allow it to recalibrate our present: “The question is not whether we know what’s coming, but how we live in the light of such expectation.”
It so happens that today is my youngest child’s fifteenth birthday. Like many mothers, I am nostalgic for the years of her childhood, which were tender and sweet. But because nostalgia can so easily turn to a resentment of Time, I am practicing (sometimes flaggingly) two things: 1) love for the time I am in now, which is the “arena of God’s redemptive action,” and 2) allowance for “God’s covenantal faithfulness across time” to “fuel [my] hope.”4
This morning, this practice looks like garden roses, pancakes, and syrup at the breakfast table; an embrace of my daughter as she heads off to school for her last day of 9th grade; our family’s favorite Chinese take-out for dinner, and gratitude that God has given Time as the canvas on which her life is painted and blooming.
Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, and author. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.
1 Cor 15:55
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time
Smith, How to Inhabit Time