The Week Before

I have been thinking about time lately. And oddly enough, I am brought back to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway's line, "The leaden circles dissolve in the air." Time seems so vast before us, stretching out into the great, unknown country, but how quickly the ground under our feet is traversed, and the arrival has come, or the time to depart.

How quickly this life seems to slip by - one day we stand, the next we fall. And where should the emphasis be? On how we stand? Where we fall? Or how we walk and who we walk with?

Life is not full of many compartments, as much as would like to label and sort and differentiate, to classify into genus, into species. It is raw, human, full of err, full of joy and pain. It cannot be sugar-coated, glazed-over and given justice to. As humanity, we have to embrace the past in order to embrace the future - but realize that the mistakes of the past cannot be undercut, cannot be change, but can be reconciled to, embraced, brought into the fold of human experience and learned from.

My story of the last few months is reflective of this fact: History is not drive by the past, with each new empirical unit building upon the other before it, but by being called into the future. Imagine a child, learning to walk, clumsily leaving her mother's arms, she stumbles forward, to where her father is waiting on the other side of the room, calling, beckoning her forward. Daring to risk face-planting into the rug, she goes forward, stumbling, standing, going, finding her way with hope, determination and triumph.

And this is time. As we trudge through this story, our story, the story we find ourselves in, may we keep lifting our hands, pushing with our hands, bending our backs into walking position again, and surging forward, for we hear the Father's voice beckoning us to come, to come home.