In the dregs of the calendar, it’s good to remember that God is always writing a story. And he writes it with time.
I was getting used to January. The timing of its sunrises. The as-it-should-be cold. The hope that the year would stay young, not get away from me. In the light of unhurried purple sunrises, I felt a slowness of time, a real chance to linger. To breathe in the sustained, cold monotony.
Especially this January. It was perhaps one of the coldest and snowiest in Colorado that I can remember. I think snow was on the ground the entire month. Even on the south-facing aspects. Here was a month full of brittle pink clouds above the red barn behind our house, capped with snow, looking east onto a snow-laden field running to meet the slowly growing light.
January, February, and March typically rank pretty high (low?) on most people’s “least-favorite months” lists. The lights of Christmas have been boxed up and stored in the attic. Easter and the in-breaking of spring feel far away. Unless you’re into, I dunno—Lent?—this unholy trio of months is the dregs of the calendar year. That sustained, cold monotony can feel like the actual worst.
I welcomed it. And I needed it. I needed a repetitive, gaze-at-the-red-barn-behind-our-house start to the new year. I needed slowness, sameness. (My hero is a Welsh farmer who has had the same dinner every day for 10 years.) Last year, something big seemed to greet each turn of the calendar. Lindsey landed a once-a-week nursing shift—an amazing blessing we weren’t looking for, that also required us to stay flexible with family rhythms. We bought, remodeled and moved into a new house—an amazing blessing but also disruptive to family rhythms and senses of normalcy. Lindsey and I experienced new stresses in our long war against infertility. I lost two grandparents—my mom’s mom and my dad’s dad. Our son’s biological father died.
As the year rolled over, I was praying that maybe “this year would be better than the last,” as Adam Duritz would say.
“Better” is too undefined. I felt a need for reprieve. I felt the need for a spiritual and cultural reset. I felt the need to build in more life white space in order to “hold on to these moments as they pass.”
But it’s impossible to hold on to moments as they pass. Time slips through the most tightly clinched fists.
As I write this, it is the seventh anniversary of our oldest child’s “Happy Home Day.” James was placed with us the first week of February 2016. He was 2-and-a-half when he first walked into our lives and living room. Walking. Kind of talking. Sweet but scared. (But so were Lindsey and I.) Here was a full-sized toddler with a personality and a past.
It was sometime later that Lindsey and I began to grieve having missed the first two years of his life. We also grieved the all-too-quickness of his toddler phase and the stressed, fleeting nature of those months. The termination of his biological parents’ parental rights (known as termination of parental rights—TPR) lasted almost exactly a year from the date James was placed with us. When I look at photos from this season, I sometimes struggle to place the memories or rightly remember what his little voice sounded like. So much of what should have been precious and endearing and joyful got swallowed up by the locusts of the foster system and the relentlessness of time. Our son is 9-and-a-half now. I have only known him for seven of those years. But he’s the boy who made us parents.
(Our oldest daughter is 8. She wasn’t placed with us until she was 4. We have had her for only half her life.)
I spend much of my time reeling from the passage of time. This is a normal part of the parenting lifestyle. Though I would contend that foster and adoptive parents especially feel this sense of loss and inevitability as seasons of our children’s lives come and go just as we’re starting to notice their beauty and intricacies.
I once heard the singer-songwriter-writer Matthew Clark say that time is God’s experience of himself. I find this equal parts mind-blowing and comforting. Because it means that time is not scarce, regardless of how I feel about it at any particular moment or month or season. It means that time is the medium in which God’s promises are fulfilled. God uses time to redeem time. God has measured out the right amount of time for long, slow, personal processes.
Like February.
Like years of infertility abruptly interrupted by the arrival of a 2-and-a-half year-old boy.
There is a sense in which every one of our kids’ Happy Home Days is a reminder of what was lost or missed. But when I can remember that the Cross was a literal point in time in which grief and redemption were present, then I, too, can be present with both.
My wife has taught me much on this point, and her perspective on our family’s history is a wise and healing one. It’s not about what has God kept from us; it’s about what he has given us. What did God give us in seven years with our son that we couldn’t have had in nine? God is writing a story, not erasing one. And he is writing it through time. He is giving us his best.
As Clark says, time can be more than the sum of moments. Eternity, he submits, is a quality.
So life moves from month to month. There is no pause button. And that’s okay. It’s not too late. I have been given much—much more than I realize, probably. There is always, thanks be to God, right now and the early light on the red barn.
