What Year Is It To You?

When I drive across the West Texas Plains, I some­times go through some lit­tle one stop­light town and jok­ingly ask myself, “I won­der what year it is here?” Hon­estly, I have dri­ven through some of those towns off and on for decades and have yet to see any sig­nif­i­cant change. There are other places on earth where life seems to stand still — the Grand Canyon for exam­ple. It is just there. I will bet that it really has not changed much in the last three thou­sand years. I still love to go there and am due another trip soon.

The more sig­nif­i­cant ques­tion has to do with what year YOU live in. I have met peo­ple that are still alive that have not left 1945. The same is true for some that have not seemed to have changed since 1968. It is easy to get stuck along the way; it is also com­fort­ing to find a place to fix­ate. The future hits the present con­sis­tently. “Stop the world I want to get off” is echoed by each gen­er­a­tion. Change is the only con­stant. Is there some way to have time out on this planet?

I find myself liv­ing in sev­eral favorite years. I loved and hated 1970. I grad­u­ated from high school and had a rad­i­cal surgery that lim­ited my life choices but kept me alive. Forty years later, I am still here and press­ing on. The year 1968 was trau­matic for most Amer­i­cans — so was 2001 — but so was the last day of 1999 (the Y2K con­cern). Elec­tion years fade in sig­nif­i­cance as one matures. Real changes are illu­sive. The year I became a cam­pus min­is­ter (1978) was inter­est­ing. The love of books and peo­ple became an intrigu­ing way of life from there to the present.

The next thing I knew, it was 1995 and some dev­as­tat­ing real­iza­tions occurred. By 1997 I was on the road — adrift in life. That was a life-changing year. Nowhere to go — wak­ing up every so often in my pickup won­der­ing where I was. It was one of the most dif­fi­cult but best years of my life. The years since then have been rel­a­tively secure, but for the most part, they are just num­bers on the calendar.

There is a part of me that stands around an empty tomb and an old cross in the year AD 33. It seems not to want to do much of any­thing else. It expe­ri­ences a deep calm and antic­i­pates only one other date — the end of the world itself. Sig­nif­i­cant his­tory is marked by events. Give me the begin­ning, the Divine mid-point, and the end. The rest is just routine.