There are some moments that feel like eternities because I cannot wait for them to be over. What comes to mind are the little agonies of my first-world existence: holding my jaw open for my orthodontist, tensing against the initial blast of cold shower water, the first ten minutes of running. I know, in each of these moments, that I will soon forget the acute sharpness of discomfort, that in just a few seconds or minutes I will meet with the blissful relief of returning to normalcy. I know I have not experienced what others go through on the daily―chronic pain, a normal that I would not think bearable. But I think I know, in small part, what it is to count the seconds and realize that a second is really quite long, to wonder why the present moment is so ceaselessly inescapable.
But then there are some moments that feel like eternities because I wish they would last forever. These are rare because it is not often that I become aware of the present moment in such brilliance. Yet they exist. I think of a February night I was walking down Broadway with two of my close college friends. We went rock climbing and ate dinner after; we had a sweet conversation over noodle soup and xiaolongbao. On the walk back I wished we wouldn’t have to part ways for the night. I wanted the moment to last forever. I wanted to stand eternally in the quiet contentment of easy, close friendship.
I think also of one of the first true spring days this semester. I left early for class to walk along the tree-lined Riverside Park, warming my shoulders in the sun, craning my head every which way as if I were just seeing a blue sky for the first time. It occurred to me how the Lord intentionally and carefully crafted that day―how he knew I would be there to enjoy it―how he then formed every ray of sun and every leaf on every tree as a kind and generous gift to me, for my good and for his glory. I tried to send pictures in a text message; they didn’t go through. “It is okay,” I wrote, “all you need to know is that it’s so beautiful and I am immensely happy.”
And I think of the moments when we sing the common doxology in church (“Praise God from whom all blessings flow”). We sometimes sing a longer version with verses from other hymns written by Thomas Ken—which I have yet to find in lyrics or recordings online, and so I have only ever heard it in the voices of my congregation and within the walls of our sanctuary. I love singing all five verses because I know we will return again at the end to the opening verse of the doxology. My soul sings in these lines. There is nothing quite like praising our triune God in audible unison with my church. I hold these moments tenderly.
And yet―and yet. The moment always ends.
It is this helpless, regretful feeling that Virginia Woolf describes in To the Lighthouse, at the end of a dinner party, as the guests disperse and the hostess departs:
With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.¹
“Already the past,” and still we cling to the last dregs of the moment, grasping, bargaining. But the present always invariably slides into the past, and the past does not belong to us. It becomes memory; it fades and creases.
Already the past. Already the present is leaving us―already it is gone, falling into oblivion, tending “towards non-existence,” in the words of Augustine. In Confessions, he ponders the elusive nature of the time, for what is truly the present moment must be the tiniest division of time as it passes by, “some bit of time which cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments.” Yet it is so fleeting, so quickly felt and then missed, that “the present occupies no space.”² In describing a certain present “moment”―a feeling or a thought that lasts for a few specific seconds―we are actually describing a series of many infinitesimal moments bound together by a common thread. We are powerless to prolong any one of them. Even now each moment is passing us by.
Thomas Manton, a Puritan minister of the seventeenth century, compared the constant movement of time―or the constant movement of us through time―to the steady progress of a ship through the water. As passengers aboard an ever-moving ship, “There is never a pause in our progress toward eternity, whether we trifle or are in earnest. Even while we read these lines the great ship is still speeding onward at the same rapid and unvarying rate.”³
Such is the way in which God made time. It moves. It progresses. No human can make time stand still. Only God can, as he did for the Israelites fighting the Amorites under Joshua’s command. At Joshua’s request, “The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day” (Josh. 10:14). This is an exceptional day in human history, for “[t]here has been no day like it before or since” (Josh. 10:15). And so we must accept the passage of time. Every moment that I wish would last forever must come to an end. Time must move on without a pause, “speeding onward at the same rapid and unvarying rate.”
Yet I think this desire to elongate and stretch the present, to make it last for a lifetime, is not so much a tragic curse of the human condition as the stamp of a longing for something more―something we were made for. For God “has put eternity into man’s heart” (Eccles. 3:11). There is, within each of us, a yearning for the infinite, the eternal, the everlasting. We are not satisfied with moments that come and go; we search, always, for a bliss that is unfailing and never ending. Birthdays and Christmases taper into a muted disappointment at the close of the day. Sunsets fade into colder winds and murky skies. Meals are cooked and eaten. Books read. Movies seen. None of these lasts forever, and none can sustain an everlasting joy.
Only God can be our eternal joy. He is “from everlasting to everlasting” (Ps. 90:2). For he made and sustains time itself, and he stands untouched by change and flux, dwelling in the eternal present, continuous and complete. So Augustine writes, “your Today does not yield to a tomorrow, nor did it follow on a yesterday. Your Today is eternity.”⁴
It is, ultimately, futile for us to try to comprehend being outside of time. We are not God. We never will be. And still, even so, we were made for him. We are complete only in him. So in a dim and shadowy sense, perhaps these moments in my life―being with friends, walking through nature, singing to my heavenly Father with my church family―these moments I often wish I could extend just a little further, are a faint taste of a true and nearing eternity. That is, my longing for the present moment to tarry a little longer is an echo of my deeper longing for an everlasting present moment in the presence of the Lord. It is a hopeful longing. For the ship plows through the waters tirelessly, progressing onward steadily until we reach the shore of eternity, for “if we look over the ship’s stern we may see by her shining wake how she is cutting through the waves. . . . And then!”⁵
And then! And then indeed we will know and proclaim and sing, “To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever” (1 Tim. 1:17).
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, [1927] 2005), 113-14.
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 232.
Charles Spurgeon, Flowers from a Puritan’s Garden: Illustrations and Meditations gathered from Thomas Manton’s Exposition of Psalm 119 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, [1883] 2022), 6.
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 230.
Charles Spurgeon, Flowers from a Puritan’s Garden: Illustrations and Meditations gathered from Thomas Manton’s Exposition of Psalm 119 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, [1883] 2022), 6.