Momentum

Forty. I am turning it. In fact, by the time this goes to press, I will have left my thirties behind forever. As it turns out, the last milestone birthday I enjoyed was twenty. Thirty and forty have been the pits.

It’s not the numbers themselves that bother me. It’s that clichéd awareness of the inexorable, unrelenting forward-movement of time. In the last year, as forty has loomed, that awareness has been compounded by some health declines in my aging parents, and osteoarthritis, of all things, in my own hands and feet. Hearing the word “arthritis” from my doctor when I described my symptoms was not, I tell you, a pleasurable experience. He even gave me the talk, the “we’re-not-getting-any-younger-my-dear” talk, as if we were co-conspirators. He’s at least sixty-five and about to retire.

When you are younger, every older person loves to shake his or her head and tell you, in exaggerated tones, how fast time moves as you age, and how you will one day understand what it’s like. It doesn’t matter if you’re ten and they’re twelve, they still get the superior tone and the knowing eyes. So I guess, with the abundance of unsolicited warning, this aging process should come as no surprise. But, generation after generation, it does. Someone else turning forty isn’t exactly going to make the evening news, but when it’s you?

I don’t feel forty, I feel eighteen. I feel like I’m just starting out and my whole life lies ahead. I feel like there is an endless supply of time to find myself and get to know God and grow. There is a profound incongruity between my sense of self and the numbers on the calendar, just as there is between my perfect, smooth-skinned eleven-month-old and my increasingly knobby fingers as I hold her. And darn it, these incongruities are hard to digest.

Hunger and seeing

But here, here is the beauty of mortality, of realizing – which you never do when you’re young – that you are not going to stay young: it lights a fire under you. My ability to waste time at age eighteen was truly shocking. I could let whole days pass with nothing to show for them except perhaps a few pages of reading or a load of laundry. Now my productivity is gaining speed even though I’m busier than I could ever have imagined being, and I still want to find more minutes in the day to use meaningfully. I grow less interested in mind-numbing activities like TV watching when there is so much yet to read and know and do, and my days are dwindling. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but it is a sobering thing to realize you are close to the halfway point.

I could compose a list of plans I want to implement. It would include scheduling regular times for Bible-reading, writing, exercise, setting healthy meal plans, connecting with wise people, supporting others. It would definitely include a heightened focus on kingdom work, at least being more sensitive to God’s prompting as opportunities for love arise. I’ve begun to act on many of these plans already, not in a New-Year’s-resolution kind of way, but just because that fire has been getting hotter as my fortieth approaches.

In spite of the anxiety that sometimes looms, what underlies my plans is a profound gratefulness for the gift of time. Were it not for that looming fortieth birthday and the struggles it has raised, I would never have arrived here at this place of hunger and seeing. What, besides running out of it, can make you grasp the Ecclesiastical brevity of time? And what, besides the fear of mortality, can make you truly realize that you want to live, were made to live? As eternity grows more real and more important, so does my longing to do well in life on this side. God grant me both the self-discipline and the surrender to make use of this incredible gift of time while I still may.