Though it may not seem like much, this week I turn 24 years old. I don't claim to be old in any sense of the word, but I do mourn the passage of time. There is something dangerously real about the revolution around the sun, something that should be remembered and returned to every time we reach a milestone: time is the fire in which we all burn (to borrow from the poet Delmore Schwartz).
We aren't guaranteed tomorrow or today, and though that may seem like a depressing image on the occasion of my birth an old friend reminded me of something. I was lamenting my impending birthday on Twitter when my friend remarked, "With each passing year, the need to live gets more important. Don't bother with a clock, keep building a legacy."
More than that I'm starting to hold fast to the theological reality that God doesn't bother with a clock either. As I was sitting in a rather interesting lecture on time and space in the context of Christian theology, my professor suggested that liturgy is our best hope for the understanding of time. That is to say, through our actions in the liturgical year, we are living out the actions of time and space in ways that only Christians can. We reach back from Advent and forward to the eschaton. We reach back from passion forward to resurrection. We work in time to explain a God beyond time and the constraints of time.
So the next time you're sitting in worship, marvel at the beauty of time. Marvel at the beauty of breath and life, too often we take these things for granted. Aging faithfully isn't about revolutions around the sun, but instead aging in the knowledge of God's never-failing presence and love.
I'm still not a fan of aging, I'd be content to be here, in this moment for the rest of time. But God, to whom I belong and in whom I have my being, has called all of us to move forward throughout life. And when my time is committed to posterity, I want people to say that he lived in the fire of time but was not consumed by it. May it be so.