I am in my 35th year of marriage. It is a lovely and loving time. We survived the first year of empty nesting after 27 years of children in the home. Now the house is very silent. No singing and piano playing, no shrieks of laughter, no calls for mom to find or do something.

This change has been devastating and necessary. I find myself wrestling with time. I don’t like it. I don’t want the steady march toward the end of “no more.” 

These last-time considerations cause me to remember talking with a woman who was dying of cancer. It was our last conversation though I had no idea it would be. She looked in such amazing health. 

I was saying how difficult it was on the last day of a Disneyland vacation, always thinking about my last taste of this, my last ride on this; the sorrow of knowing this was the last of all these fun experiences. She stared at me with such sorrow, I will never forget her look. 

I see now I had triggered something she was wrestling with. Her last experiences. Her final taste of ice cream, her last sunset, her last earthly hug. 

If we allow ourselves to dwell on this, the only outcome is suffering and despair. I see this in my friend who is an atheist. He was full of energy and vigor in his thirties. On top of the world. Now as he heads towards sixty, he looks deeply oppressed. His daughter calls him grumpy. What hope does he have? So many of the delights of life are being removed — skiing, dining with friends, his wife is very ill, all these sorrows. 

This is why the hope of the Gospel is so profound. Hope interrupts sorrow. Time becomes no more than an idea, and real life becomes where God is and eternity dwells. No more tears, no more suffering, no cancer, no goodbyes. 

How does this contemplation inform my decisions? How does it compel me to live differently? How does hope infuse my daily experiences of loss and change?

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” – Romans 8:38-39