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.
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.
It was December 1990, exactly 30 years ago. I had just turned 14.
It was cold that December in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A cold Christmas in Africa was new to me, after spending my childhood in the west African tropics. But Addis is almost 8000 feet above sea level, and the temperatures go down into the 40’s at night.
Our house was drafty, if you could call it a house. It was actually an apartment that had been created from a school dormitory, so it wasn’t exactly homey. The hallway was long and wide and sterile, tiled floor and high ceilings, and the hallway seemed to make up the bulk of the house. Huge rolling barn doors separated us from the apartments on either side. The living room was attached to that hallway, and the one source of heat came from the fireplace. Everything else was cold–the floor, the concrete walls, my bedroom, my heart.
