How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

by James K.A. Smith

While we rightly entrust ourselves to a God who is the same today, yesterday, and forever, we mistakenly imagine this translates into a one-size-fits-all approach to what faithfulness looks like.

For every creature, to be is to become; to exist is to change; to have and to hold is to lose and to mourn; to awake is to hope.

Our being subject to the conditions of temporality is not a prison but a focus. Gifted with boundaries, we are given room to be happy, to find joy, to enjoy time and—perhaps?—even toil.

The conversion of possibility into actuality is not a loss but a focusing. For every path taken, of course, another was not, and our mercurial souls will sometimes wander back to the fork in the road and wonder. But only stasis could have kept the options open, and for temporal beings, stasis is death.

Sometimes the most faithful act of remembering requires a destruction of our nostalgias; sometimes the most creative act of remembering is to ruin the illusions we’ve learned to live with.

We are thrown into a time and place, thrown into a story that is our history, and these form the horizons of possibility for us—our temporal halo we described earlier. That is not a limitation as much as a focusing, a gifted specificity. This corner of earth I’ve been given to till.

If all that I’ve become and learned and acquired and experienced was just overwhelmed and made null by grace, then salvation would be an obliteration rather than redemption.

Aging is not a curse; autumn is not a punishment; not all that is fleeting should be counted loss.

But to give oneself over to it for a season is always accompanied by the realization it’s not forever.

Seasons are temporary yet bequeath to us something we carry forward. Seasons ask something of us. They both take time and give something back.

I am not what I’m enduring. I am not reduced to what I am experiencing.

But somehow it was a moving revelation to realize that God also saw what I had lived through—that the eternal God understood what I had lost, what had been missing, what the locusts had eaten and left me bereft of.