Lives Wrapped Up in Borrowed Time
As I look at the calendar this morning, I see it’s December 8, just a little over two weeks until Christmas. The days between Thanksgiving and Christmas seem to grow shorter every year, and there’s a sadness in that for me, because somewhere deep inside is a little boy who thought Christmas was never going to get here. That kid would sit on the couch in the living room and take in all the lights on the decorated Christmas tree and the packages wrapped in the four‑rolls‑for‑thirty‑nine‑cents‑a‑package Christmas paper my parents bought, the kind that was almost see‑through when the Santas and snowmen were printed on a milky white background.
The only season of the year when I spent any time in our living room as a child was when the tree was lit and decorated. Unlike today, when I often enjoy the tree with my iPhone in hand or a notebook computer in my lap, back then I had neither. I just sat and stared in amazement at the colorful beauty that filled a corner of our otherwise black‑and‑white lives for a few weeks each December. Time moved so slowly then.
I looked up and noticed the clock. Today, unlike most days in retirement, I had a deadline to get ready and get out the door, because for the next two days I’m returning to the classroom to substitute teach.
The teacher I’m filling in for, who I’ll call Katarina, is a first‑year teacher who pursued the calling after her sons were nearly half grown. But I knew her long before that. She was the smiling, energetic 14‑year‑old who sat in my honors geography class back in the late 90s.
I estimate that I taught maybe 8,000 students over a nearly three‑decade career. When I write that number, I can hardly believe it. Yet I remember Katarina clearly, a jewel of a kid—cheerful, kind, and hardworking. Back then, the idea that she might someday be my colleague, that I might substitute in her classroom, would have been hard to conceive—but then, many things in life are hard to conceive until they happen to you. The year 2025 might as well have been the year 3000.
When I was a boy of 10 or 12 in the early 1970s, the time to what felt like an unthinkable future—the year 2000—seemed like an eternity. Now that same span of time—twenty‑five or thirty years—feels much shorter than I ever would have imagined back then.
The circle feels much narrower now, and all too finite. I don’t remember exactly when it occurred to me, but it was probably sometime in my early 50s when it struck me that I have many fewer days ahead than I have behind me. After turning 65 earlier this year, I’ve begun to think seriously about something that was inconceivable to that boy on the couch: finishing my life well.
Unlike when I was a teenager or a young dad with young children, I’m not afraid of what comes when the book on this life is finally closed. But I do feel like I still have many chapters to write before that time, and I have this deep need to finish them well, to tie things together. I want each one to feel complete, like a package wrapped up with a bow.
If I’m wrapping my wife’s Christmas present, I know roughly how much time I have before she gets home. But the wrapping I still need to do with my life comes with a much more uncertain deadline. That little boy on the couch couldn’t have imagined me at 65, and I can’t picture the end any more clearly than he could picture me.
Whether we can picture the future or not, it is coming, arriving one day at a time and then quietly giving way to tomorrow. That may not sound profound, but it begins to feel that way when we stop and look back at all our yesterdays. James 4:14 reminds us that we do not know what tomorrow will bring, and that our life is like a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. To a young person, that sounds like complete hyperbole, but further down the road of life, we recognize it as absolute truth.
. . . and that’s what I know today.
