Nothing quite trips me out like time, and the swiftness of its passage. This is of course a common thing among all human beings as we age. If you’re into your 40s you get what I’m saying, and we get it more with every passing year. This strangeness I’m speaking of is impossible to understand in your 20s and 30s. I sure didn’t. We were at a conference when I was in my 30s, and the speaker was talking about a 3–5-year plan. He said, “You young people think 5 years is a long time; it’s not!” I remember thinking, yes, it is! Oh no, it’s not.
We think we understand this swift passage in our younger years, but it’s only theoretical. If you’re in your 20s or 30s and you look at someone in their 60s or 70s, to you they’re “old;” but those people don’t feel old. Being young, you can’t conceive of yourself being that “old,” and think it will take a long time to get there. It won’t! And when you do get to be that “old” you look at yourself in the mirror and wonder, how the hell did this happen! And so quickly. We oldersters can’t conceive of ourselves as “old” any more than when we were young. But there we are. When my grandfather was 92 and on death’s door, I remember him telling me, “Look at me. Inside I feel like I’m 16, but my body sure doesn’t.”
I was reminded of the swiftness when I read these words of David in Psalm 144:3, 4:
O Lord, what is man that you regard him,
or the son of man that you think of him?
4 Man is like a breath;
his days are like a passing shadow.
A breath is fleeting indeed, and that is our life. David could obviously relate to tripping out on time’s swift passage (and he lived 2500 years ago!) because he wrote similar thoughts in Psalm 103:
15 As for man, his days are like grass;
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
16 for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.
Grass is a little more enduring than a breath, but not much. This Psalm is so beautiful because David focuses on the blessings of God for His people, and that His steadfast love for them “is from everlasting to everlasting.” David’s almost maniacal focus on the Lord is the answer to time’s swift passage, our hope of life eternal with the God who created life itself. And without sin and misery and death!
I’ve always loved history, almost majored in it in college. I’m currently reading Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The Birth of Britain, and just finished a chapter on Henry V. This king of England lived from 1386 to 1422, died at only 35, and reading about his life and times almost made him present in mine. Those people living in medieval Europe at the time seemed alive to me. I know they were just like us, but that was 600 years ago! Poof! Over. They couldn’t conceive of 600 years passing from their lives any more than we can.
Unfortunately, it’s so much easier to live by sight than by faith (i.e., trust), so most people obsess with the here and now, the mundane, and treat these things as if they are more important than what comes after this life. This is why the topic of death, our mortality, is not a polite topic of conversation. It’s such a downer and most people would just as soon ignore it even though they know they’re headed on a freight train to the grave. The infinite distractions of modern secular life make that particularly easy, but it’s always been so. Here is Pascal’s take on his contemporaries in the 17th century:
We can’t imagine a condition that is pleasant without fun and noise. We assume that every condition is agreeable to which we can enjoy some sort of distraction. But think what kind of happiness it is that consists merely in being diverted from thinking about ourselves! As though they could wipe out eternity and enjoy some passing happiness merely by repressing their thoughts.
In spite of all these miseries man wants to be happy, and only to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how can he go about this? It would be best if he could make himself immortal, but since he cannot do this, he has decided to stop thinking about it. Being unable to cure death, misery, and ignorance, men have decided that in order to be happy, they must repress thinking about such things.
But try as we might, death stalks us at every turn, and as Pascal further says, “The last scene of the play is bloody, however fine the rest of it. They throw dirt over your head, and it is finished forever.” Yet that last scene is something everyone knows is coming, and sooner than we think. Yet most people refuse to even think about it, as if the thinking or talking about it would make it real when it’s not.
Even we as Christians fall into this trap thinking if we just make it over the next hill, we’ll find the elusive thing called happiness, or fulfillment, or some such satisfaction of soul, but as soon as we crest the hill we see there’s another higher hill beyond it to climb. It’s the “grass is always greener” affliction. If only I had . . .
As my children were growing up, I had a saying that’s a slight variation of Wesley’s statement to Buttercup in The Princess Bride, Life is disappointment, Highness. No matter what you get in life, no matter how much you want it and dream of it and aspire to it, it will never fully satisfy. Never. In fact, after you reach what you thought was the peak, you find it isn’t so great after all.
Our youngest son seemed especially given to this temptation. When he wanted something like a guitar, he really wanted it, had to have it, and I knew he thought if he just got it that would be it, fulfillment. As soon as he opened the box I would mock him, saying something like, “Now your life has meaning! You’ll finally get true fulfillment.” And he would reply, “Oh, shut up!” He got the message. But even when we know this, we’re still easily seduced by it.
Me and my best friend forever, Greg Luther Smith (since 7th grade, which is almost forever!), went to Italy in 2014. I planned every moment for many months, and we talked about it all the time, how great it would be, once in a lifetime, etc. and it was incredible. But afterward we almost felt let down. All the incredible artwork we saw in the Vatican Museum or the Ufizzi, the incredible history of the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, the beauty of Rome and Florence, all of it was amazing. But afterward we both felt like, that’s it? Not that it wasn’t all that we expected, but it couldn’t live up to the anticipation and expectation. Nothing in life ever does.
Solomon told us why: God has put eternity into the heart of man, and only what is eternal can truly fill it—that would be God himself in Christ. Pascal said it best once again:
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?
This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.
God through Isaiah encourages us not to be seduced by the empty promises of this life:
“Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
2 Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and you will delight in the richest of fare.
3 Give ear and come to me;
listen, that you may live.
Ironically, only in God himself can we truly enjoy what this life offers.
He starts with a video of now Governor Gavin Newsom from fifteen years ago when he was mayor of San Francisco talking about a “ten-year plan” to address homelessness. To say his plan failed doesn’t do justice to the concept of failure. If my math is correct, fifteen years ago was 2009. I had to visit San Francisco in 2014 for a business trip, and even then the homeless problem disgusted me. I couldn’t walk outside my hotel without being accosted by a homeless person. Now its orders of magnitude worse. Please watch it. We must understand what the scourge of neo-Marxist wokism is doing to our country, and watching will make the consequences abundantly clear.
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