How to Accept the Passing of Time with Children

On the end of summer, children aging, and missed opportunities

Photo by Marcus Wallis on Unsplash

The summer break is coming to an end for me and my family, which means that another season of memory-making is closing, my children are getting older, and I have to come to terms with how I spent my precious time with my family. Which means I have to come to terms with regret, because I didn’t always spend it well. Even when I wasn’t busy on my phone or distracted or anxious, I wasn’t always present and enjoying my family. I was elsewhere, worried about other things. And now that time is past and we’re all a little older and my children have moved one step closer to adulthood and I feel like I have so little to show for it. But this is the natural state of things. If you love well—love life, children, a spouse, friends, this creation—you will feel an ache at the passing of time, an acknowledgement that no matter how attentive and present and intentional you have been, you have still missed it. The beauty of the moment eluded you. You got a glimpse, but only enough to miss it once it was gone. And now you are left only with a fading memory. And how can that ever be enough? This, it seems to me, is a serious problem for human existence: how to deal with the passing of time.

One side of this problem is how to deal with the problem with the redemption of corrupted time: traumas, suffering, sorrow, etc. How do we reconcile those bad experiences in our lives? But the other side of the problem is how to deal with the passing of good experiences. And that’s what I’m focused on here. How do I accept the fact that my children will never sit in my lap and beg for me to read Dr. Seuss to them again? How do I accept the fact that during those years I was so distracted and tired and anxious that I didn’t properly enjoy it? In other words, how do we accept the passing of time, the loss of all that is precious to us, eventually? The answer, I believe, is that we don’t lose everything precious. Rather, those glimpses of beauty and goodness are “hints and guesses” at what awaits us in glory. To accept the passing of time is to accept that there is no earthly gathering together of moments and memories, no successful hoarding that can protect you from loss. There is only the hope that in Christ we may have life abundantly. And in the fullness of time all things will be reconciled to him. So our duty is to live faithfully in the moment, allowing time to pass, not greedily, but with gratitude for every moment, knowing that it is a gift.