looking through me

Twenty-some years slid by, but I’d have known them anywhere—their voices, their faces, their laughs . . . unchanged. It’s as though we were together last December, not some long ago Christmas buried in my childhood.

Family: the record skips and we dance without missing a beat.

Maybe it’s a miniscule glimpse of timelessness. Maybe it’s an imperfect, shadowy insight into God. He is unconstrained by beginning or end or any other point in time. He is fully present and fully past and fully future. He is. And maybe as His image bearers we contain a fraction of that ability to abide. Maybe in knowing one another we slip the shackles of time.

The relationships and bonds of family move on a separate plane from our day-to-day existence. We know one another apart from the details of our schedules. Because it isn’t about the time at all; it’s about the mysterious thread stitching us together. A gossamer filament binding life to life, sometimes running through bloodlines and sometimes woven by choice.

The older I get the fainter the clock ticks, the less pronounced its peels.

While my nephew hones in on the chime of his grandparents’ clock—every 15 minutes his head swivels to find the sound—and my nieces count their age by the month and when we’ll be together again by the day—they’re young.

At some point the seconds stilled for me; I stopped measuring time and started tracking memory. It means more than hours and years.

Love laces us together. And what is time in the face of love?