‘Time Marches On, Doesn’t It?’

I once viewed winter through a lens of dread. As someone who has fought a lifelong battle with anxiety and depression, it was the season with which I was least compatible. Shorter days, colder weather and the inability to experience the outdoors as much proved to be a difficult emotional maze to navigate. Some of you out there can undoubtedly relate.

Life sped up on me as I aged, got married and had children. Perhaps it was fitting that my youngest son was born in January, for it serves as a reminder that we cannot fit seasons into a box. Good can happen anytime. I look in the mirror sometimes and cannot believe that I turn 45 in May, will have been married for nearly half of those years and have two teenagers at home who will be leaving the nest before we know it. My dad likes to say, “Time marches on, doesn’t it?” Indeed it does, Pops, and all we can do is march along with it. James 4:14 tells us, “Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. For you are just a vapor that appears for a little while, and then vanishes away.” The events of the last few years have taught me to live life one day at a time. Kirby Puckett, one of my favorite baseball players of all-time, once said, “Tomorrow is not promised to any of us.” Wiser words have never been spoken. Puckett died at the age of 45, five years before he was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

With Christmas and all the chaos associated with the holidays now behind us, perhaps we should use the next few months to reflect on what God has done, what He continues to do and what He will do moving forward. His promises to us endure, without regard to the color of the sky or what the temperature on the thermometer might read.

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