Time and I have always performed a kind of awkward dance together.
Too often, I try to lead. I try to push time forward—some call it future-tripping. When I was a teen, I couldn’t wait to leave home and attend college. When I was in college, I looked forward to getting married. When my kids were little, I thought “I can’t wait until he can sleep through the night…stop needing diapers…clean up after himself…”
Since I hit forty a few years ago—okay, five years ago—I’ve wanted time to slow down. Pause. Stop altogether. But instead, it seems to be on a downhill slide. Everything they say that happens to your body after you turn forty is true. My skin has turned treasonous. I pull muscles for no apparent reason. I have both a space heater and an additional air conditioner next to my side of the bed. Sometimes I use them both at the same time. You can laugh; my doctor did.
And I keep hearing that old Steve Miller Band song, “Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ into the future...”
When my kids were young, older women would tell me to treasure that time with them, because before I knew it, they would be grown. Even now, as I grumble about my life as a chauffeur and look forward to my oldest getting his license, older moms tell me how they long to return to the days of driving their children from place to place. The saying is true, “the days are long, the years short.”
Midlife is a strange season and one I find difficult to adjust to. I’m smack dab in the middle of life. It’s as though I stand on a timeline, where all the years to one side of me are that of my youth and everything ahead of me is that of aging. All the decades leading up to where I now stand were focused on achieving and gaining. Acquiring. Adding. When I look forward, life seems more about losing. Children take flight. Houses get smaller. Work becomes less, health elusive.
But at the same time, I feel more comfortable with who I am than I ever did in my youth. I have a sweet and tender relationship with the Lord that developed through time and experience. While in my younger days, I had a head knowledge of God’s love and faithfulness, I’ve since seen him work in countless ways and now know with certainty it is true. The prayer life I now have, I wouldn’t trade it for the one I had in my 20’s. The trust and dependency I’ve learned through trial and hardship is one I wish my younger self knew—rather than trusting in myself, plans, and systems to make life work.
Moses also knew how fast time flies, how our life is but a breath. He wrote in Psalm 90: “For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (vv. 9-10). John Calvin commented: “men foolishly glory in their excellence, since, whether they will or no, they are constrained to look to the time to come. And as soon as they open their eyes, they see that they are dragged and carried forward to death with rapid haste, and that their excellence is every moment vanishing away.” I can relate to that “rapid haste” Calvin refers to. Though I know time moves forward in the exact same rate, moment after moment, day after day, it somehow feels faster these days. My kids seem to grow an inch a week. More and more they stretch their wings. They now find themselves where I once was: looking forward to greater freedom and life on their own.
Moses then prayed, “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (v.12). It is wisdom to consider the brevity of life. It is wisdom to pause and look backward to realize all you have learned and then forward to see the finish line closer than it was before. But in so doing, not to panic and fear the death that is to come; rather, to focus the days we have left on living for God’s glory. For those who are in Christ know there is more to come in eternity where time will no longer be of consequence.
In my dance with time, I’ve learned that I can’t lead; it’s not my place to do so. Rather, I must follow the steps marked out for me. I must move forward, keeping along with time’s set rhythm. If I pay attention to his steps, I see he’s really not going any faster than before. And if I cast aside the distractions that cause me to stumble and focus instead on my call to live for God’s glory, I realize: I’ve got all the time I need.
