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Time is a manipulative little buggar.
Stretching out the days here, speeding by a year there—an hour is almost never the same length depending on how he doles out the minutes.
And oh, how Time likes to play with those minutes.
We know, from the Broadway musical, Rent, that five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred of them make up a year.
But we still don’t REALLY know just exactly how LONG that actually takes.
In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Just how DO you measure a year of life?
This year, Time has played his most cunning trick yet—on the 25th of this month I will be turning fifty.
And I don’t know HOW THE HECK THAT HAPPENED.
I don’t FEEL fifty.
(Well—some days my BODY does… Heck, some days my body feels EIGHTY…)
I feel like the same woman who moved here 20 years go—our newly minted two-year-old along for the ride and Buddy still two years from arriving on the scene.
And I have to confess—sometimes it’s quite shocking to remember that I’m NOT.
That very same year I started working at my church.
I was 30 and we’d been here in Cbus for six months.
I’ve spent almost TWENTY years on staff now—and here’s the weird thing: my senior pastor, other pastoral colleagues, fellow members of staff—both younger and older than I—many of them are still here with me, 20 years later. It’s REALLY cool. But here’s what I can’t figure out:
If THEY’RE not any older, then HOW AM I?
That is, perhaps, the deception of working with the same adults for decades.
They just don’t seem to age.
Therefore, I didn’t feel like I had, either.
And this, again, is Time playing his little tricks on us.
And the trick is this: adults are just adults until suddenly they’re OLD PEOPLE.
They don’t actually GET OLDER, they just get more lines and the occasional grays, while the world just keeps going on around them.
Until, all of a sudden—BOOM—they’re inexplicably OLD.
And nobody knows exactly HOW it happened.
It just DOES.
And Time snickers behind our backs.
Time, you see, only shows his hand with the young.
I remarked to my husband once, six years into our marriage, that if our cats were children, we’d have a first grader by now.
This was mind-blowing to me.
(Time has many cards up his sleeve.)
Enough time to make a FIRST GRADER had gone by and I’d barely even NOTICED.
But if my cats had been children?
I WOULD HAVE SEEN IT.
And, truly, that is the only way (besides those lines and stray hairs) I have to validate the actual passage of Time—my children are no longer babies.
My daughter is legal.
My son is taller than me.
THIS is how I know the minutes have been passing into years.
I see it with my own two eyes.
And it makes me wonder what this is like for my parents.
Did I at some point become “just an adult” for them, as well?
Did I stop aging for some mysterious period of time, as they did for me?
Or do they look at me and SEE the work of Time—thinking,
“How did this happen—our firstborn is FIFTY?!?!”
I wonder.
I am, of course, not the only one to ponder Time’s artful dodgery.
Yasunari Kawabata writes that, “Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
James Gleick writes that, “We go back and forth between being time’s master and its victim.”
Stevie Wonder writes that, “Time is long but life is short.”
Albert Einstein writes that, “Time is an illusion.”
And Dr. Seuss asks, “How did it get so late so soon?”
This is where I find myself—looking into July, staring down fifty, knowing that my life is but “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14), and asking, along with Nina Simone,
WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES?
…and finding no one really has an satisfactory answer.