Twice a year our country frets over the semi-annual time change between standard and daylight savings time. We have this thing about time. It can move too slowly when we are young. Too fast when we are old. Our meager effort to save more daylight for part of the year doesn’t change the fact there are still only 24 hours in a day. As we move into the months with less daylight, we only exchange brighter mornings for darker afternoons.
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.” I am now in that season when the heart stirs me a lot. After retirement, I have been able to see the forest and the trees. Time is still precious but moves at as fast a pace as when I was working. And now, we await our first grandchild at the end of December. And we can hardly wait!
People have often remarked how utterly transformative grandparenting is. The arrival of this blessed event is first revealed in the growing pile of equipment, supplies, books, and toys accumulating in our garage. This child whose gender we don’t yet know will be born into a family that is well prepared.
I remember when our first child was born. My mother-in-law, a retired nurse, stayed with us for a few days when we brought our son home. She introduced us to what we quickly learned to call our “Egg McNana” breakfast sandwich. This kept us going through the usual sleep-depriving events like late night feedings, manifold diaper changes, first fevers, and the other travails that new parents must navigate. Days blurred as there seemed barely enough time to do anything else. We still enjoy these sandwiches occasionally even now recalling these early months of parenthood.
My own mother, also a retired nurse, became a regular babysitter for us. When our son was a little older, I would drop him off for a day of fun with Grandma Daniel. My mom was in her 70’s but this grandchild gave her almost superhuman powers. I have photos of her on her hands and knees pushing our toddler in a little red wagon. They had their own rituals of going to the library for story time, taking walks, and serving lunch at the nearby Senior Center. Often when I arrived to take Mark home, they would both be asleep tired from their adventures of the day.
So the anticipation is growing in our house. What will this child bring to our lives as grandparents? It is fun to imagine those things we want to do together. We want to explore the world as he or she begins to learn and read and embark on their own adventures. What stirs in our hearts, like anyone expecting a child may attest to, is a mix of wonder and apprehension: wonder for all the beauty of the world the child will discover and apprehension at the discord in our society the child will enter.
This also is the season of the year when some of us reflect on another birth anticipated long ago to humble parents whose world was also racked with social disruption. The Christ child entered human life much like any of us, with parents who are stretched for time but filled with love. With the Christmas story the stirrings of our hearts focus on new life and the possibilities that are entailed.
This is the season when time can both slow down and speed up together. It slows when the day seems it will never come for our deepest hopes to be realized. It speeds up when our minds are filled with anxieties and endless tasks of preparation still ahead.
Perhaps saving more daylight is good for farmers and for us. Now there is something else stirring our hearts, connecting us to a movement beyond our earthly routines and celestial cycles. But in either case, the time is ours to fill with a different kind of light—the hope of renewal, of right living, of new birth. The time is coming, the ancient prophets say. Our hope is at hand.