How do you feel about change? Do new experiences fill you with fear or with excitement? Are you a Luke Skywalker, gazing out across the desert behind your uncle’s moisture farm and wishing you were someplace else (maybe pulverizing the forces of evil, or just going to Toshi station to pick up some power converters)? Or are you a Bilbo Baggins, perfectly content in the warmth of your hobbit hole and deeply unsettled by the thought of dwarves showing up uninvited in your kitchen?
I’m a mix of the two (Bilbo Skywalker), and I think most of us are both in varying degrees. Some changes scare us. Others excite us. We’re eager to let go of some things. Others we hold onto for dear life. I love traveling to new places, trying new things, and meeting new people. However, there are other kinds of transition that I don’t like. I hate saying goodbye to friends who I know I won’t see for a long time. I’ve struggled with the transition from college life to life at home, where I sometimes feel stuck and wish I had more direction about where to go next. I hate watching the health of family members deteriorate as a degenerative disease takes its toll. I wake up early to get a head start on the day, and then find that the day is over way faster than I wanted it to be. Recently, I’ve been saddened to see bright yellows, burnt oranges, and deep reds disappearing from tree branches, rustling fields of dried corn giving way to bare stretches of dirt. I know winter’s on its way, but I wish fall would hang around just a little bit longer.
In today’s world, talking about the fleeting nature of things is viewed as dismal and downright awkward. We’re told over and over again that we need to carve out a name for ourselves, one that’ll stand the test of time. We buy stuff that’s built to last, stocking up on it to insulate ourselves against any losses that could come our way. We’re told to fight tooth and nail against the aging process (which, incidentally, does funky stuff to our teeth and nails) and to idolize youth and beauty. We fill uncomfortable silence with noise and distract ourselves from the daily grind with entertainment (I’m all-too-often guilty of this last form of escapism). But no matter how fast we run and how hard we fight against it, change has a way of sneaking up on us.
In some ways, our aversion to deterioration is a good thing, a natural response to a world that’s been messed up by human evil. We weren’t created to experience decay and death. Physical suffering, dysfunctional relationships, and the loss of loved ones are facts of life on this earth; but they feel unnatural and wrong. We grieve these changes and ask why the world is the way it is. No matter how many times we do it, parting with friends and family never seems to get easier. As the Lumineers sing: “Nobody knows how to say goodbye. It sounds so easy ’till you try.” Even though we know in our bones that each of us will grow old and die, we yearn for life that is everlasting. Andrew Peterson put it well in his song “Day by Day”: we are all “children of eternity on the run from entropy.”
And yet, despite our honest complaints and our dishonest denials, decay and death are realities. Over and over again, the stories in the Bible talk about the passing of time as something that we have to come to terms with. Jesus talked a whole lot about the fleeting nature of our material possessions and the need to prepare for death. In Isaiah 40, the prophet Isaiah ponders the frailty of human life: “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades…” (Isaiah 40: 6-7). Similarly, in the book of Ecclesiastes, we’re told that death is an intrinsic part of life: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2) Things come, and things pass away. That’s the way life is. However, the response to this reality that the author of Ecclesiastes encourages isn’t apathy or grim resignation. Rather, it’s enjoyment of God’s good gifts: “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do…Enjoy life with the wife whom you love…” (Ecclesiastes 9:7, 9)
How can we enjoy our lives, savoring every moment, when we know that the long black train is rumbling down the tracks to take us away? We live each day with our focus on eternity. If we’re only focused on the world around us, then we’re bound to get scared when the things that we’ve put our hope in start to fade away. However, those who follow the way of Jesus Christ are people who have put their hope in the eternal promises of God – the resurrection of our bodies, new life after the grave, and a renewed earth. For those who have this hope, the trajectory of time isn’t a downward spiral into empty space. It’s an arrow shooting upward, busting through the sky into a future that’s better than we could have dared to hope. God has promised to redeem every single thing that has been broken by human evil. As a wise hobbit once said, everything sad is going to come untrue. Even as we say our goodbyes, we cling to the truth that Ben Shive describes in his song “A Last Time for Everything,” the promise that “we’re low on loneliness, and long goodbyes are in short supply.”
For Christians, part of the beauty of the Halloween season is remembering that while death comes for all of us and while there are dark forces at work in the world, we don’t have to fear these things. We don’t have to fear elections that didn’t go like we had hoped. We don’t have to fear the process of growing old, or even the prospect of saying goodbye to loved ones. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the battle between good and evil has been won, and we’ve been invited to join the victory celebration. What has been lost will be recovered. We’ll see each other again. The long black train is still coming for us, but now we know where it’s headed. We can dance at the depot as we wait.
If we’re facing hardships, we can rest in the assurance that they will pass, if not in this life then in the next. While I was in the middle of writing this yesterday, my brother turned on the movie Cast Away (one of my all-time favorites), which is all about the passing of time and the daily challenge of holding on to hope. At the end of that movie, Chuck Noland, a former FedEx executive and the sole survivor of a terrible plane crash, reflects on his four years of isolation on a remote island. In a famous monologue, he describes a failed suicide attempt to his friend: “I couldn’t even kill myself the way I wanted to. I had power over nothing. And that’s when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I knew, somehow, that I had to stay alive. Somehow. I had to keep breathing. Even though there was no reason to hope. So that’s what I did. I stayed alive. I kept breathing. And one day my logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in and gave me a sail. And now here I am. I’m back. In Memphis, talking to you…And I know what I have to do now. I gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”
If we’re enjoying the ride, we can savor each of God’s good gifts in the here and now as foretastes of what’s still to come. In the end, even the passing of time will be redeemed. The same passage of the Bible that says that human beings are like grass ends with this beautiful promise: “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:30-31). The eternal hope that Jesus gives is what fills the cycle of our days with meaning. Rich Mullins put it well in his song “Home”: “Knowing that morning follows evening makes each new day come as a gift.”
Today, on my drive home from work, tiny flakes of snow were falling outside for the first time this year. Looking out the window, I saw the farmlands bracing themselves for the cold. This year, I’ve watched the fields change from brown to green to amber and back to brown again. Winter’s coming. I can hear it puffing down the tracks. Like the earth, I’ve got to get ready. But until it comes, I’ll savor the colors still hanging on to the trees. And when the colors are gone, I’ll do my best to brave the snow as I wait for them to come back.
Words for Wayfarers 