Living and Loving Like There’s No Tomorrow: A Reflection

Time is a strange thing. All at once, it is set and immovable, yet at the same time, it seems to shift and stretch based on our perspective. Fifteen minutes to sit and talk with your friends is up in the blink of an eye; fifteen minutes left in math class takes an eternity. The drive to the beach is exciting and over quickly; the drive back home lengthened by dread.

In one’s mind, time can be a nonentity, everything can seem to stretch on indefinitely, then one phone call, one comment, can shrink your perception of time, confining it within a few days.

When Avacely first came to us, it was like this. In fact, it was like this for every foster baby that has passed through our home. It was kind of like Schrodinger’s baby - each one could stay for three days or three months or even three years, and there was no way to know which it would be. In a way, it was all of them at once.

With Avacely, it seemed she would stay forever. She came home from the hospital, just like my other three biological siblings. Like them, she was impossibly small, almost frighteningly so. When Mom set her car seat on the floor, my sisters and brother and I stood close, but not too close, almost afraid to breathe too hard lest this tiny, fragile thing break. Wrinkled skin, small hands and feet, a shock of dark hair - instantly, we loved her, this little guest come to stay.

And so she stayed. She was raised up in our home just like the four of us. She became slowly less fragile, attacking her bottles with a zeal that revealed itself in increasingly chubby cheeks and thighs. We learned how to make her laugh, how to calm her when she cried, what foods she liked and disliked. Nobody asked after her, leaving no reminder that she was, in fact, a ward of the state. For all intents and purposes, she was ours, and she would stay that way forever.

On some level, we all knew that this was not true, yet the human mind has a way of forgetting about time. For while our lives are divided by time into schedules, while it takes its toll on our bodies, our surroundings, our loved ones, and all creation, still, like ostriches with our heads in the sand, we live as if we are immortal. So it was with Avacely.

In eight months, when we received the phone call informing us that it was time for Avacely to go, it came as a terrible shock. It shouldn’t have, but it did. And suddenly, the time with her that we felt would stretch on forever was violently cut down into fifteen days. Fifteen days left to feed her. Fifteen days left to put her to bed. Fifteen days left to make her laugh, to love her. Time morphed into a distinctly finite commodity.

With that, something changed in my interactions with my little sister. They became more intentional. Her interruptions to sleep, or school, or free time were no longer impositions. We could not add more time, so instead, we added to the time. Those fifteen days remain unique in my memory - the fellowship I experienced with my family, friends, and of course, with Avacely, was richer and fuller, sorrowful as its coming to an end would be.

When we dropped her off at her new family’s home, we had no regrets. We had loved this little baby, nourished her from a scrawny, sickly newborn to a healthy, happy toddler. The end of our time with her was unbearably painful, yet our effect on her and hers on us would last much beyond.

This experience, while it seemed unique at the time, does no longer. For all of our relationships are this way. Every relationship you are in has an end date. We may not have the exact date in mind, but it is there. Death, illness, conflict, distance - all the pains of a fallen world have the inevitable effect of cutting our relationships short. For even while it seemed Avacely would stay forever, the date was always set. God knew, and in His wisdom, numbered our time with her - so He does in all our relationships.

Now this may seem depressing, and in a way, sadness is the right response. We are creatures built with eternity in mind - it was not meant to be this way. Yet while we mourn this truth, we must mourn it with hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).

So how do we live in a temporary world? How do we approach our relationships if they all must, as C.S. Lewis states in his reflection A Grief Observed, “end in pain” (Lewis)?

The answer is found in Jesus’s admonition in Mark 12:31: "“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

While our time with Avacely would not last forever, our treatment of her and care for her would. Likewise, the joy she brought us would outlast her stay in our home.

Growing up, I remember my mom telling me to leave people and places better than I found them. And this should be the attitude with which we enter into all temporal relationships: with the truth in mind that while earthly relationships do not last forever, there are eternal ramifications to all our actions. To love our neighbor as ourselves is to interact with each other in such a way that each of us is left better than we were. It is to live with limited time in mind, knowing that we are not promised tomorrow. Only then can we live and love to the fullest extent of our ability. And the only way we can do this is through Christ, the One who, in His interactions with His fallen creation, transforms us from the inside out and brings us from death to life.

Psalm 90:12 - “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”