Witness in the Word · Module 2 — How It Happens Without You Noticing
Class 5 – At Some Point Things Changed
Drift is rarely a decision. It is a drawn-out failure to decide. This module, from At Some Point Things Changed and The Hardened Heart, traces how a heart hardens in ordinary, unremarkable steps — and how Scripture’s own case studies (Pharaoh, Saul, the rich young ruler) show the same pattern up close.
Source: At Some Point Things Changed, Chapter One
Yesterday Has Now Become Today
When we are young, time has very little meaning. Today ends. Tomorrow comes. And beyond tomorrow, there seems to be an unlimited supply of other tomorrows waiting for us. We would never say that we expect to live forever. But there is something in the way a child looks at life that assumes there will always be another day.
Death is much the same way. A child may know that people die without really understanding that death belongs in his world too. At that age, we tend to think that old people die, and that we are far removed from such an occurrence. We hear that someone has died. We may attend a funeral and see adults cry. But the finality of death is difficult for a child to comprehend until it reaches someone he knows.
I remember one afternoon when it reached my world.
I was still in the fourth or fifth grade. Like most children, I came home from school expecting the ordinary things that made home familiar. Mama would often have something waiting for us — perhaps tea cakes — and I expected that afternoon to continue much as the afternoon before it had.
But Mama was unhappy, and I could tell immediately that something had happened. Then she told me, “Grandma died today.”
Understanding Revealed Through Time
I did not understand death then as I understand it now. A child cannot. But I understood enough to know that Grandma was gone. The woman I had watched in her little apron had simply been part of the world as I knew it. Now she would no longer be there. Something that had seemed permanent to a child had changed, and it could not be changed back.
Childhood did what childhood usually does. It continued. There were friends, school days, summers, Christmases, and birthdays that never seemed to arrive quickly enough. Even after being introduced to death, I was still a child, and children naturally look toward what comes next rather than spend much time thinking about what has already passed.
In fact, during those years we usually want time to move faster. We want to be old enough to stay up later, old enough to drive, old enough to make our own decisions. Eventually we want to be old enough to live under our own roof and our own rules. Everything we really want seems to be somewhere ahead of us, so we lean toward tomorrow and wish the years would hurry.
They eventually do, although not in the way we imagined.
The change from childhood to youth, and from youth into adulthood, does not happen on a particular morning. One season of life simply begins blending into another. Our interests change. Our responsibilities increase. And things that seemed enormously important a few years earlier begin losing their importance, as something else takes their place.
Eventually life begins asking questions that are much more serious than how long it will be before we can drive. One of those questions is what vocation we will choose to follow, perhaps for the next forty years. That is a tremendous decision to ask of a young person — one who has lived only a small portion of his life and knows very little about what the next forty years will require of him.
Time And Decisions Correspond
For many people, that decision is almost like taking a shot in the dark. We cannot clearly see the target. We are not completely certain where to aim. But eventually a decision has to be made. A direction is chosen, and life begins moving down a road that may determine where we live, the people we meet, the family we raise, and much of what occupies our time for decades to come.
Some people sincerely seek God in making those decisions. They ask the Lord for guidance and try to follow the direction He gives. Others know that God is there but are not fully committed to listening for His voice. There were times in my own life when that was true of me. I knew the Lord was there. And I knew enough about Him to know that He should have had a greater place in my decisions than I was sometimes willing to give Him.
Yet whether we listen or fail to listen, the Lord has not moved. He was present through our childhood and every season since, even the seasons when we did not notice Him there. We may change our priorities many times along the road, but God does not change with them.
While all these decisions are being made, something else is happening almost unnoticed. Time is moving. Things are changing. Nothing remains the same for very long. Each day carries us farther from where we began. Yet when we are young adults, standing near the beginning of our working years, we rarely think in those terms — there appears to be so much road ahead that there is little reason to wonder how quickly we are traveling it.
Life Begins to Fill Up
Then responsibilities begin accumulating. We marry, raise families, make a living, and pay bills. We solve problems, buy homes, make mistakes, enjoy successes, and experience disappointments. We prepare for whatever tomorrow might bring. None of those things is unusual. They are simply life being lived. But life can become so full of living that we give very little thought to how quickly it is passing.
I remember when I first entered the workplace. One day there was a scurry around the office because a senior department head was retiring. I was still young. I hardly knew anyone. But I was invited to attend his retirement gathering. I remember sitting there, looking at this man, thinking what a young person naturally thinks when looking at someone near the end of a long career: Man, this guy is old.
I listened to his remarks, but after all these years I cannot remember most of what he said. There was one statement, however, that stayed with me. He told us, “Take time to smell the roses along the way.”
At the time I did not really understand what he meant. Why would somebody need to stop and smell the roses? I was one of the youngest people in the office. My career was ahead of me. There was work to do, things to accomplish, and apparently plenty of time in which to accomplish them. Yet for some reason those words found a place in my memory. They remained there long after most of the other things said that day had disappeared.
The Years Keep Moving
The years continued, as they always do. Work became more familiar. Responsibilities increased. And the things that had once been somewhere in the future became the life I was actually living. When we are busy making a living and providing for a family, we do not normally stop in the middle of the day to think about how quickly life is passing. We are concerned with what needs to be done before supper, what has to be paid by Friday, and what needs attention at work. We think about what one of the children needs, and what must be prepared for tomorrow. The days are filled, because time has brought us to that place in life that is filled with responsibility.
The clock keeps running whether we notice it or not. For most people, time means getting up for work and wishing the day would hurry to its end — all so we can rise and do it again tomorrow. And so it goes, day after day, without our ever noticing that something is changing along the way. After enough years have passed, little things begin reminding us of that fact. We hear a song that seems fairly recent, and discover it was released thirty years ago. We talk about something that happened “a few years ago,” and then realize those few years were actually fifteen or twenty. Children who once depended on us have children of their own. And people we once considered old are suddenly our age.
The arithmetic of life begins to surprise us, because the answer always seems to contain more years than we expected. There was a time when we could not get the years to move quickly enough. Now they seem to be moving faster than we would like. Tomorrow, which once appeared to be somewhere in the distance, has quietly become today. And much of what we once called today has already become yesterday.
When the Body Keeps Count
Our bodies eventually begin reminding us too. Things we once did without thinking may require a little more thought. Getting out of bed may not be quite as easy as it once was. A familiar name may refuse to come to mind for a moment. The name eventually comes, but we noticed the hesitation. The body has been keeping track of the years even when the mind was too busy to notice them.
Then there is the mirror. We stand looking at the person staring back at us, and eventually we recognize something familiar in that face. The face has begun to look like our father. It did not happen suddenly. The only sudden thing is the realization that we now look more like the father we remember than the son who once looked up at him.
I remember looking at my father when I was young. He was the biggest man in my life. His age seemed so far removed from mine that I could hardly imagine ever occupying his place. Now there are times when I look into the mirror and recognize some of those same features looking back at me. Time has created an image that resembles the man I remember. And with that recognition comes a realization that is difficult to ignore: I have become an age I once thought belonged to somebody else.
That is when the question How did I get here? begins to have meaning it could never have had when I was twenty years old. Obviously, I know how I got here. I was present for it, every year, every month, every day. The deeper question is how all those years could have passed without my recognizing how quickly they were passing. How did the tomorrow I spent so much time preparing for become yesterday?
What He Meant by the Roses
Perhaps now I understand what that older man was trying to tell me when he said to take time to smell the roses. He was not really talking about flowers. He was telling a group of younger people something he had learned after spending most of his working life learning it. There would always be another project, another problem, another bill, another goal — and another reason to believe that whatever mattered could be attended to later.
I heard his words that day, but I did not yet possess the years necessary to understand them. I do now.
A Vapor We Cannot Hold
James asks, “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away” (James 4:14, NKJV). A young person can read those words and understand what they say, but there comes a time when experience begins teaching us what they mean. A vapor is real, but it cannot be held. It is present for a time, and then it is gone.
The brevity of life does not make life less valuable. It makes the days God gives us more valuable, because they cannot be stored for later. Once a day has been lived, it becomes part of a past we can remember but cannot enter again. That does not mean we should live looking backward and regretting everything we wish we had done differently. It means we should recognize the value of the day that is still in our hands.
The Same Life, Seen Backward
I can look backward now and see the boy who came home from school and heard Mama say, “Grandma died today.” I can remember the young man sitting at a retirement gathering, wondering why an old man was talking about smelling roses. I can remember looking toward years that seemed almost unlimited. And I can look in the mirror today and see some of my father’s face looking back at me.
Those are not separate stories; they are parts of the same life. The boy became the young man. The young man went to work. The years of work became decades. Children grew up. People we loved grew older. Some left us. Responsibilities that once seemed permanent eventually passed, and things that were once somewhere out in the future became memories.
I cannot point to a particular day when it happened. At some point things changed.
The tomorrow I once thought was so far away became today, and much of what I once called today has become yesterday. The question now is not whether I can get those years back, because I cannot. The question is what the passing of those years has finally taught me, and what I will do with the time God has placed in my hands now.
Before we can answer that, however, we need to go back to one of the easiest assumptions to make when most of life still appears to be ahead of us.
There is time.
For Reflection
Read: Psalm 90:12; Ecclesiastes 3:1
1. Wayne writes, "I cannot point to a particular day when it happened. At some point things changed." Can you point to a day — or is your own drift also one you can only see looking backward?
2. What "tomorrow" have you been assuming would always be there?
3. Looking honestly at the years already spent, what is different about you now than you expected to be at this point in your life?
This Week: Sit down and write a short, honest timeline of your own life — not to dwell on it, but to see clearly where the change actually happened.