Today, I am reminded of life’s circles.
My father is 51 years old. I am 21 years old. He is 30 years older than me. I am a young man, as he once was. He is an older man as I, Lord willing, will one day be.
I have realized my youth, the tender place I stand at in the progression of this human experience. I am married to a lovely woman, and in recent months I have watched nearly all my friends be given in marriage.
I am young and healthy. I will be a father in a month and some change, and my wife will be a mother. We will be parents to a baby girl, the remainder of our lives being given over to a sweet and indefinite change.
Last night, I stood in the bathroom for about 30 minutes watching old videos of me and my friends from the last few years, our adventures and laughs and sacred togetherness. Somehow, I so often forget that I am in fact living the few brief moments that we call ‘youth’, and furthermore I often forget that I will not always be.
“It’s crazy, man. I feel like it’s getting to me”, my father says to me on the phone as he leaves the funeral of an old high school friend, a man who was exactly 5 days older than him.
As he says this, I am bluntly stunned with the reality that the amount of new marriages and new relationships and new babies I have seen and been a part of in this season of my life nearly equate to the amount of funerals and griefs and court-ordered divorce home sales he has been a part of in this season of his life.
I begin see circles. I see my youth in all it’s wonder and foolishness and misplaced worry held up in stark contrast to the relentless ticking of time that takes a hold of every man and woman who was ever born into this world; the consequences of being alive. I see that one consequence of my father’s thirty year head start is that he is much stronger than me, much wiser than me, much more learned than me. I also see that delivered with this strength and wisdom of years is the coin of time’s bitter flipside: Dead friends, aging family, divorcing couples without number.
While I see in him so much of the good that I am missing from my lack of years, I also see the weight of aging, the strange effect that time has on individuals and generations that are just a few steps ahead of you. I don’t particularly enjoy this idea, but when I face it head on, I see something profound.
I recall from the grainy, aged evidence that my father was once like me, young and unknowing, free in many ways but stuck in many others. That those friends were not always dead. They had jokes, they got in trouble, they fell in love. Those marriages were once whole. Those grandparents were once just parents, people who had their own unknowing seasons, people with far less gray in their hair and far more strength than the unstoppable force of time now grants them.
I am young now, but I will grow old. I cannot escape the rule, and neither can my father or his father or his great great great grandfather. The headstones are testaments. The clock is a prophet. It is strange to realize this, but also very beautiful. Why is beautiful? Because despite the inevitability of age and decay and death, there is still for each day a new batch of mercy, a fresh chance. A chance to get coffee with your dad. A chance to work hard. A chance to love well. A chance to make a joke. A chance to read and write and create and serve the One who created you and allowed you to do and feel and know and see and experience all of it in the first place.
I have no great conclusion to draw from this brief eye opening other than sheer gratitude. When my day does come to die, when my youth fails me and the years overtake me in their classic manner, I will stand before the righteous God who made me with nothing to give but thanks and praise. I am thankful that I was born to my father and mother. I am thankful they were born to theirs. I am thankful for the house I grew up in that I now live in with my wife. I am thankful for my siblings and my loving family. I am thankful that my father took me to Monster Jam and Titans games. I’m thankful that his father was gentle and kind and prayed with him before bed. I am thankful for the women they loved who have filled the world with their feminine goodness.
When I stand before God, He will have a lot of thanks to listen to.
Oddly enough, I am even thankful for this story’s finite nature, because I know I must take today as seriously as death. I must treat my life as a thing that will not always be here. I must treat the lives of those I love as things that must be cherished in each moment; now, today.
Above all, I rest easy with the deathly circles of this life because I know that there is a greater circle that remains unbroken, a circle of eternity beyond what we see and know now. There is a hope after death, a hope that lets my father be strong in the presence of a fading past, a hope that places a precious new life into young, unknowing hands, a hope that bled on a cross for a wretch like me so that those circles of death would one day be put away forever.
That gets to me, and that stays with me.
— I. S. H.
So beautiful Ian! Your perception and inspiration is far beyond your years. 🙌🏻❤️
Beautiful…