Last night I met some old friends from high school. It had been 20+ years since we last interacted. Twenty years. Hard to believe. Time moves so quickly.
I am finding that turning 40 has increased my desire to connect with the past. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is a growing realization of the brevity of life. The faster life moves, the more you want to hold onto something, slow it down, go back in time. Memories become your only link to younger days.
I visit my hometown once a year. Each year things change. Driving through town, I notice the new businesses, the abandoned buildings, the changing landscape.
Today I passed the area where my family used to live when I was five or six years old. The area is overgrown. All the houses are gone. You would never know that it was once a thriving little neighborhood with a community pool, nearby baseball fields, and a little fast food diner called the “Safari.”
I can still picture it in my mind. I have snippets of memories…several of them as clear as a mental videotape. Yet looking at the present reality, no one would ever know. I can only describe it to my wife and kids. I don’t even have pictures to provide a context. The memory is all I have.
That’s why getting together with old friends can be so interesting. Someone else relives the memory with you. They add frames to forgotten scenes. They bring a different camera angle. Add color. And they help you connect the past to the present.
Last night I heard what happened to many people I haven’t seen since high school. Jobs, marriages, kids, divorces, deaths. My mind was swimming trying to remember faces and names.
120 of us shared four years together in high school. In fact, many of us went through all twelve years of school together. In a small town, your lives overlap in so many ways. School, Little League, church, city park, football games, community events.
We shared so much time together that I felt like I should have known them better. But I don’t. I guess as a child you are too busy playing to think about relationships. And in high school, you are just trying to survive the insecurities of growing up and trying to find your place in the elaborate social strata of teenage cliques to really get to know someone beyond the surface level.
I find that nostalgia is a double-edged sword. You enjoy the memory but then find yourself melancholy in the end.
I was curious about the meaning of nostalgia. It literally means “severe homesickness.” Interesting. It is a longing for home. A desire for simpler days. A hunger for the security, relationship, and joy of a family. I guess high school is sort of like a family. You hang around each other all the time but, in the end, often don’t know each other very well.
Or nostalgia may be a longing for something even greater, something we really can’t describe, something eternal. Something that lasts.
The Bible says that we have “eternity in our hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). There is a part of us that longs to stand outside time, to stop it, or at least put the brakes on. We want to capture time, experience eternity, return to Eden. Yet time in this world keeps relentlessly marching forward. Indifferent to us. Things change, aging happens, people die…whether we like it or not.
That’s why one of the oldest psalms in the Bible has a simple prayer: Lord, teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom (Psalm 90:12).
Wisdom is recognizing the brevity of life. It is knowing that time is short and making the most of every opportunity. It is not letting relationships slip past. It is not wasting energy and years in sin (which always promises more than it delivers). It is not holding onto bitterness. It is not ignoring God.
God loans us time. It is not ours to keep. We only have it for a moment. What we do with it is up to us.
The best thing as a Christian is knowing that “home” is not in the past. It is in the future. What we long for is not in this world but prepared for the next. We can’t go back to Eden but we can move forward toward it.
Our hope is in Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). He entered time so that we could hold onto something, Someone, outside of time.
