<\/p>\n
[Apologies for the delay in posts: technical difficulties on the heels of travel and Thanksgiving have kept me away. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving! Tomorrow, our series “Holy Space” recommences with photojournalist Katie Archibald-Woodward.]<\/em><\/p>\n This past weekend I turned 38. With the advent of the late thirties, birthdays increasingly come with a tinge of mortality and a twang of melancholy when before they never did.<\/p>\n And there are those things I just find hard to understand about growing older\u2026.<\/p>\n \u2026like how it is you can still get those juicy zits decades after you thought teenage acne was thankfully over<\/p>\n \u2026or how it is that your hair starts stubbornly sprouting in places you never thought it could<\/p>\n …or why, when time, still measured in the same increments now seems to speed by rather than slowly meander.<\/p>\n But this last fact imbues the aging process with a certain sacred blessedness, too. Time in both its essence and its parts becomes so much more treasured: I want more of it, as much of it as I can fit in a day; and I find myself wanting to stop its passage more often these days or to bundle up moments.<\/p>\n And, laughter is more poignantly lovely\u2014often filtered through the quirky remarks of my children. Like yesterday, when my 4-year-old stood at the front of a long line of pharmacy customers holding a musical Spongebob Squarepants card and giggling loudly whenever Spongebob began to shake: \u201cLook, Mommy, Spongebob is tooting!,\u201d she exclaimed loudly, in a continuation of a newfound obsession with potty humor. Or, when a few hours later my son explained rain on a bleak winter day as \u201cGod sweating.\u201d (The imagery is rich on so many levels, right? God at the gym, lifting dumbbells, or on the Stairmaster.)<\/p>\n These things that are passing away I want to hold on to maybe stubbornly\u2014in spite of Jesus\u2019 admonition not to grieve such things. What happens to such things when God is making all things new?, I wonder.<\/p>\n With time, too, the embodied presence of persons is entrusted with holiness. A voice on the telephone. An embrace. A handshake. Even a brief exchange with a stranger at the grocery store. These are mystical visions of sorts themselves, as Marilynne Robinson writes in Gilead<\/i>, when she realizes \u201cthere is nothing more astonishing than a human face\u2026It has something to do with incarnation\u2026Any human face is a claim on you, because you can\u2019t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.\u201d<\/p>\n The claim itself\u2014of a face or person in front of me\u2014 is now stronger as I grow older. And this is a beautiful thing. Such things should not pass away, I protest, but if they must, then may they be hallowed and wonderful in their passage into all things new.<\/p>\n Maybe this passage and our realization of it are one aspect of sanctification.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Apologies for the delay in posts: technical difficulties on the heels of travel and Thanksgiving have kept me away. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving! Tomorrow, our series “Holy Space” recommences with photojournalist Katie Archibald-Woodward.] This past weekend I turned 38. With the advent of the late thirties, birthdays increasingly come with a tinge…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,91],"tags":[1982,1986,1983,1984,1980],"class_list":["post-4662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death","category-motherhood","tag-gilead","tag-growing-older-gracefully","tag-marilynne-robinson","tag-spongebob-squarepants","tag-the-aging-process"],"yoast_head":"\n