The North Star

Time is such a balancing agent. In other words, time doesn't discriminate. Time doesn't favor one over the other. Time is, well, time. It goes. It flows. It ages us all.

And one day we look up and we've lost so many friends.

In a moment of, uh, boredom, longing, wondering, I spent some time yesterday looking up some of what I remember as my best stuff at The Times-Picayune, a newspaper in New Orleans if you're not familiar with it. While doing that, somehow, I came across a news item on the St. Tammany News, a small newspaper located north of New Orleans. Owners of that, I believe, five-day-a-week newspaper announced it was closing. Friends of mine there are out jobs. Again.

Then as I wandered around the website, I came across an obit. Someone from a previous church had died. No one had called. If ever I felt the ultimate in time passing, it was this moment. No one sees Mary and I worthy of being called when a former congregant, a friend I would say, dies.

Time has passed. We're gone. Eighth months or so have passed and we are no longer there.

That's the way of life, I suppose. We bop into a situation and we glide out and one day we look up and no one remembers us.

The writer of Ecclesiastes puts it this way:
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance, ...

 

My young children aren't young children any longer. Today is my grandson's sixth birthday. My oldest grandson will be 10 in September. Ten?

 

I'm one step closer to the grave every time I sit up in the morning, rising with aching back, knees and such after a less than fitful night of sleep.

 

Time goes, and what was 20 years ago no longer matters a whole lot. I retired from journalism more than three years ago and I thought we would stay in touch. We don't. My fault as much as anyone's. Only one person ever calls, and that's very intermediate. That's just the way it is. Time has passed. I've moved on. They've moved on.

 

The writer goes on to say: " Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless."

 

Now, I disagree with that. We all die, but not everything is meaningless. It can't be. Please don't let it be.

 

Love of family, even of friends who move in and out of our lives, is meaningful.

Church, relationship with Jesus, even scripture, is meaningful.

 

Time goes, and what was last week becomes last decade, and we look around and the scenery has changed.

 

But one thing remains constant. One thing.

 

Jesus is the same as when this journey began. The same yesterday, today, and forevermore.

 

That's the North Star for me. He makes the time spent worth it.