I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more I feel like I’m walking in darkness. People say the world is getting darker, but when I contemplate all the horrors of the past that I have not experienced (World Wars, the Great Depression, a pre-antibiotic or anesthesia world), I will venture to guess that an intensifying darkness is only my perception. The world has always been dark. And since I had an abuse-free childhood, it makes sense that with age and wisdom comes a deepening understanding of the depth of the evil that has always shadowed the earth. Shadows my own heart.
Of course, I love more people more intensely than I used to, and thus, the more burdens I carry. I keep thinking that once my children are healthy, thriving, and successfully launched into the world, some burdens will be relieved. Until that is, I hear folks in the season above me praying for their grandchildren. Even Paul, who experienced shipwrecks and floggings, starvation and prison, lists his concern for those he loved and invested in as perhaps the heaviest burden of all (II Cor. 11:27-28).
It’s too bad that so often, the emphasis at Christmas is on all those warm fuzzy feelings that go along with family and parties and merry-making. We imagine that our lives in December should look like one big Norman Rockwell painting or Hallmark movie; when it doesn’t, those images mock us. How dare they look so happy when the world is so heavy? Maybe I’m just not in the Christmas spirit this year, we think.
My mom tells the story of taking my brother and me to a Christmas event at the American Embassy in Liberia. I had just turned seven and had lived in Liberia for a year. There was a Santa at that party, and he asked Paul and me what we wanted for Christmas. We sat perched on his knee, completely stumped, unable to think of a single thing. There was no question in our young minds that we wanted Christmas presents. But since a year had separated us from television, Toys R Us, and the Sears catalog, we couldn’t possibly imagine what we wanted those gifts to be.
My kids used to be the same way. But after four years in America? They can fill up an Amazon wishlist like nobody’s business.
When we moved into our new house a year after we arrived in California, I fretted over the laminate flooring, which is light brown on the bottom floor and dark brown from the stairs up, and gazed disapprovingly at the bedroom doors which look like they’ve been patched over several times by miscreant children. That is, until Gil gazed disbelievingly at me and reminded me that this house is way nicer than anything we’ve ever lived in, and what on earth had happened to me?
This month I turned 46 and every third grader knows that 46 rounds up to 50. I am officially middle-aged.
I know I’m supposed to have wrinkles but I worry if I’m supposed to have this many wrinkles. I have an expressive face which makes the dentist think she’s torturing me but really I’m just being expressive, and all that expression means a lot of wrinkles. But I’ve discovered that if you just reduce the lighting in your bathroom, half the wrinkles go away. I should market this on Shark Tank.
When I was young, my Gram told me I had good eyes. We would sit in her downstairs family room with the rust-and-gold-patterned carpet and she would do her bead crafts. I would crawl around on the floor and pick up the beads she had dropped and she told me I had good eyes. But the other day I was trying to thread a needle and reluctantly got out my reading glasses because I couldn’t see the darn thing. Apparently, I don’t have good eyes anymore. A kid spotted me with the glasses on and told me they made me look like a grandma and now that kid is locked in his room.
Here I am, caught in a life that feels like it should be eternal but every moment is only a second long. I live with the passage of time every minute of every day and yet it still surprises me. Every Christmas I exclaim that I can’t believe it’s already Christmas and every time I see a baby, I am surprised by how fast that baby has grown. I greatly anticipate the upcoming vacation or party, and then suddenly it’s over. I yearned for the baby to be potty-trained and the child to make her own sandwiches and the teenager to graduate but then I get there and look back with wistfulness.
So here I am at 46 and determined to no longer be surprised by the passage of time. Instead I find myself frantically grasping as it slips through my fingers. Johnny is my last child to be in elementary school, so my children are no longer young. On his birthday, he wanted me to physically bring his cupcakes to school instead of sending them with him, so I majorly inconvenienced myself and did it just because it was the last time.
My children don’t need me to brush their teeth anymore, but they need me to drive them and that makes me miss the brushing-teeth years. One evening when Gil was sick, I made two trips to school, two trips to church, and two trips to the soccer fields. In one evening. Won’t it be nice when in a few years we have our evenings back? I asked Gil. Yet simultaneously my heart beat empty at the thought of empty spaces at the dinner table, empty bedrooms. No. It won’t be nice at all, actually. It sounds dreadful.
My years of influence over them are flitting away like dandelion fluff. I think about how Grace will be able to drive on her own soon, and how nice that will be, and then I think about how I won’t get to hear her chats on the way home, and I don’t think that will be nice at all, actually. I think I want the future but really I want it to stay here, right now, in this moment. But I never get that.
By age 46, you would think I would be used to this already, but it’s like there’s something in my soul that knows that one day the Joy will arrive and time will stop and it will go on forever and ever. Perhaps that’s because I am a soul who is trapped in a linear existence but was created for eternity. And one day I’ll get there.
When I was a girl, my most prized possession was my sticker collection. Around age 10, Mom took me to a craft boutique, and I clearly remember the moment I laid my eyes on the most perfect sticker book ever: A photo album with a pink hand-sewn cover, hearts embroidered on top.
My Gram snuck stickers into birthday cards. I peeled every sticker off A+ quizzes. “Trading stickers” was my favorite friend activity, and I relished carefully placing each sticker in that perfect album, gazing upon their colorful, sublime wonder over and over again.
I lay in bed, worrying about fires and thieves and tidal waves, and knew confidently what item I would save first: that sticker book.
A couple of weeks ago, my parents dug out my boxes of childhood treasures from the depths of their garage and brought them to my house. Lo and behold, there was my sticker book.
I look disdainfully at the object of my childhood adoration and see it for what it really is: a book of sticky paper, now browning around the edges. Thirty-five years offer a great deal of perspective.
Last week journalist Mindy Belz tweeted, “Pentecostal leader in Moldova writes of daughter and her family vacating their apartment and moving in with him so Ukrainian refugees can live in her place.”
I volunteer weekly at an after-school program for disadvantaged kids, and I went to the banquet that celebrated this ministry’s 20 year anniversary.
We watched a video montage of how the ministry has expanded over the years. We listened to young people, now grown up, whose lives were changed because of the investment in them.
It was a lovely evening. But when I got to my car afterwards, I wept. I enjoy being a part of this ministry, but the banquet reminded me that I am a newcomer; I know nothing of the history of two decades. And all I could think about was how I had left behind 20 years of history in Tanzania.
I did not anticipate the lostness that comes with starting life over again.
