Summer is ending. In the words of Shakespeare, “summer’s lease hath all too short a date” (Sonnet 18). At the end of every August, I wonder how time has come and gone and the days have blurred into a kaleidoscope of shifting, selective memories. Summer is too short, too quick, too fleeting.
But then again, so is everything else. My friends and I parrot to each other the same refrain: “I can’t believe we’re already sophomores.” Last summer, it was something similar: “I can’t believe we graduated high school!” At school, we cycle through semesters and seasons, all the while wondering aloud how time has passed so quickly, how it’s already winter break, or how finals have rolled around so soon. On Fridays, the rest of the week has already faded into a time lapse that fits into a few breaths. On Sunday nights, I grieve the rapid atrophy of the weekend.
Summer is too short, but so is every other season, every year, every semester, month, week, day. The sun is setting, I often observe, with a twinge of panic, and I have only just begun to do something worthwhile. I turned nineteen in June. I know that’s not old―I refuse to complain about being nineteen―but I’m now older than all the tributes in The Hunger Games and Harry Potter at the end of The Deathly Hallows. I’m the same age as Jane Eyre when she meets Rochester, and Jonathan Edwards in his first pastorate in New York, and the Marquis de Lafayette as he joined the Continental Army in the American Revolution.
There is something healthy about honest reflection when we come to milestones, and that often means summarizing seasons or entire lives in broad strokes and accomplishments. It is good to think about the overall bent of our lives. And yet, in Holiness, J.C. Ryle writes, “Life is made up of days, and days of hours, and the little things of every hour are never so little as to be beneath the care of a Christian” (143).
I am reminded, too, of Jonathan Edwards’s fifth resolution: “Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can.” Isn’t that what life is? A continuing series of moments, split-second decisions to do this or that? We cannot change the past, and we cannot control the future. We are subject to the immediate present. “And so,” Wendell Berry writes in Hannah Coulter, “you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence” (148).
I suspect this looks something like killing the engine of my dad’s car at eleven at night beside the curb in front of our house, turning off the headlights, listening to the remainder of a song play in the darkness. I think this looks something like driving to the beach alone on a weeknight, reading a book on a bench facing the ocean as the last rays of the sun glaze the pages with a reddish glow. I finished Virginia Woolf’s The Waves on a hill above the shore; “I saw through the thick leaves of habit” (373).
But I think this looks most like living coram Deo, before the face of God: praying not to a distant deity or a vague idea, but to the one, true, living God of the universe; reading the Bible not first as a historical text or a collection of ancient myths, but as the living and active Word of God; choosing to share gospel truth at the momentary, almost insignificant crossroads of conversations.
In Psalm 90:12, Moses prays to God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” As a planner, my temptation is to count the days I have left to finish this assignment or that goal, to obsess over the allotment of minutes to each task, to number my days with a heart of anxiety and fear. Jesus knows this is our tendency: “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Matt. 6:27). It is, of course, a rhetorical question. No one can add a single hour to his span of life. It does not matter how much we think about the future. It is, and will always be, outside our control. We are so, so limited―creatures confined to this precise present moment, incapable of altering even the immediate past, powerless to reach into the future.
And so, on the cusp of summer’s end, I am confronted with these two truths: that time is fleeting, and that I am bound to the present. Summer is quickly drawing to a close, but for me, even now, it is still summer. How I wish that time was forever and that I could change the future! But this is not so. The present moment is the lot the Lord has given to me now. I will be content with my daily, even hourly, portion. I will try to steward each second of time he has seen fit to place in my hands. I will give thanks for the present, which is sometimes quiet, sometimes transitory, sometimes frightening. I must remind myself that he has determined to place me here and now.
These reflections have pushed me to send messages, see friends, and say things I would otherwise avoid out of fear. Time is too precious to delay. When I go back to New York, I am resolved to approach people I have never met at church and to go outside in decent weather before it gets too cold. The uncertainty of tomorrow makes today far more valuable. But most of all, in the actual present moment, I think about how I can be faithful right now. The past is a corroding memory; the future is a wavering, hazy dream. I have only the present. The Lord has given it to me in perfect love and wisdom. He only calls me to be a faithful steward of the present.
This week, I went to my church’s volleyball night for the first time. I have never played volleyball before. I missed passes and hit off center and instinctively shrank back from flying balls. As I watched others around me serve and spike and set with a practiced ease, the temptation for me was to dwell on my inadequacies and grow frustrated with my lack of coordination and experience. But I thought some more. Neither my teammates nor I could fairly expect me to be good at a game I had never played before. If I tried my best with a good attitude, no one―not even I―had much warrant to be disappointed in my performance. I am only human. It is prideful of me to presume that if I just tried a little harder, I could transcend typical human limitations and become a competent volleyball player in just a couple of hours. For I am human, and humans generally improve at things when they practice repeatedly and stick out the steep learning curve. I am human, confined to the present, and in the present I am a beginner at volleyball.
No, this present reality is not comfortable. I wish I could skip to some distant future in which I am comfortable around guys who aggressively slap volleyballs over the net at sixty miles an hour. But here is the sometimes hard, mostly good, truth: God has placed me in the present. I am a beginner at many little things: volleyball, small talk, children’s ministry, writing nonfiction, talking to adults, cooking, having a roommate. I am a beginner too at memorizing Scripture, praying in groups, and evangelism. God does not call me to be advanced at the things I have only just begun to learn. But he calls me to be faithful to my present inexperience: to be humble before others, to not take myself too seriously, to receive instruction, to devote myself to growing and learning, to be okay with existing in the here and the now―here, having not yet arrived, and now, being yet incomplete.