I was stumbling through my Apple News– a habit of which I am happy to say that 2020 has essentially broken me– looking for a specific article, when I happened upon a headline that made me stop and stare.
My immediate reaction was dubious. Who was this “we”? And a whole year, “lost”? Where was the author positing that it had gone, exactly?
I clicked, because I am, as mentioned above, no longer tied to maintaining the delicate rubric of that particular feed. I clicked, and I read, and I found myself scratching my head, then shaking it, and finally feeling that familiar sadness that always settles in my heart when confronted with the realities of people living without Christ.
Because folks, “we” didn’t lost a year. What was lost– what is lost– is the world.
For all its eventfulness, 2020 has for many been a lost year, in several senses of the word: On top of an enormous loss of human lives, the pandemic paused many people’s progress on long-plotted family and career goals. It forced countless celebrations and holiday gatherings either onto Zoom or out of existence. And it warped many people’s sense of time, causing months-long stretches to seem interminable in the moment but like they passed in a blip in retrospect.
I take no issue with the assertion that those who said goodbye to loved ones this year have likely drifted in a fog of mere existence for months. I know what it is to bury those dear to me, and yes, time becomes meaningless as your navigate the many steps of grief. Thinking back on the seasons in which I wrestled with the absence of someone, time did slip through my fingers– whole swaths of it, in a strange slow motion that also flew by faster than I realized, unbidden. Could one have “lost” 2020 through the workings of death? Surely. I’ll not debate that.
But wishes unfulfilled? Trajectories interrupted? Milestones not celebrated?
Since when is the measure of a year only the things we have achieved, the parties we’ve attended, or the boxes we have checked on our own personal quest to make it to the finish line of life with as much of man’s approval as we can? For whom, exactly, are days worth living only if these expectations are met? If this is how you decide whether a year was profitable, then no, 2020 was probably not the year you will look back on and see as especially “good.” It was not the gathering of days designed to advance the goals of most careers or cultivate accolades. It was something different entirely than what most of us assumed it would be, something that forced a focus on the inward rather than the outward.
Even as 2020 took turn after dreadful turn, people carried with them, in their imagination, the year they did not get to have. Many of the dozen people I interviewed were grappling with what this pause meant for their long-term life goals, and were trying to figure out where to channel their thwarted ambition.
This is the problem, isn’t it? “The year they did not get to have.”
Oh, expectation.
Oh, assumption.
Oh, what we had planned.
I know what 2020 was supposed to look like for my family. Heck, I graduated a senior from our homeschool. I sent a kid to Basic. I had a son with tickets to work in a closed country. My husband’s international training calendar was the fullest it has ever been. I had a book I had outlined to begin work on.
Like most of you, this year has not been what it was supposed to be. My kids have seen each set of their remaining grandparents once. There was no Open House for Jack’s graduation, no family road trip to see him become an official Airman. Mathaus did not use his passport to leave the U.S. Christopher’s single trip out of country was cut short in a race to get back to American soil before all travel was suspended. And I wrote… not much.
Clearly, the pause button– if not the full-out stop– was hit on these intended events, and more. “Thwarted ambition”? Sure. But to what purpose? To whose glory?
It is easy, even as followers of Christ, to take our annual measure of the year that’s coming to a close and find it lacking, to see only the things that did not come to pass and the ideas that never came to fruition. But folks, life was lived in 202. It was real. It was breath in our lungs. It was sunrises granted by a Heavenly Father who was not hiding Himself from the equation.
It was not, as the world would have you believe, a year lost.
If 2020 has given us anything, it should be this: time is precious and is to be lived fully, enthusiastically, in spite of the voices saying otherwise. Sure, the grandmother who laid aside her vision of a year spent investing in her own job or more volunteer work or a better garden to assist in the online schooling of her grandkids did not meet whatever goals she had for herself. But let’s not downplay the blessing poured into the life of those children, who spent more time with her than in a classroom, making memories that they will carry with them long after she, too, is gone. Was that time lost? Oh, on the contrary. That was time gained, redeemed, salvaged from the mundane and made more sacred by the act of her sacrifice. What about the celebrations that didn’t happen? The births, the birthdays, the graduations? Were those milestones “lost”? Not if the missing parties instead gave birth to more meaningful personal acknowledgment, or new ways of framing those events in the context of of a larger sense of family and community and what it means to be invested in the lives of those we love.
As for family goals delayed, I will repeat here what I have said for decades: if you are waiting on the perfect time to do anything, you will never find it. There is no ideal season in which to have a new baby, adopt a child, move cross country, take a new job, transition into ministry, pull a kid from school, get married…
None.
Step forward in faith into whatever calling God has placed on your life and be confident that the storm that follows is exactly the refinement you needed in your journey of sanctification. Timing is not everything. In fact, in God’s economy… it’s usually not anything.
I pray 2020 does not feel like a “lost” year to you. I pray that as you look back you see the great movements of a sovereign God working out His purposes, even if they felt shrouded in a mystery you couldn’t quite decipher. I pray you found joy, and that your goals aligned more closely with His as the dross of distraction was burned away. I pray time was spent with a more purposeful focus on investing in others, and in finding new ways to love and spread your gifts. I pray you see all that you gained and the many ways you grew, and accept what you were not given as not being His plan.
I pray that you do not count yourself among those who will march into 2021 waving the banner of Self just as frantically as they have in years past, having learned nothing, having come no closer to recognizing what matters in this one, simple, beautiful life they’ve been given.
Hopefully, the future will be more vivid. “I think the fact that we’re not making memories right now means that when you finally get back out again,” Santos said, “time is going to go by really fast because we’re doing fun things, but it’s also going to be etched in our memory books in a really richer way.” After a gray year, we might see the times to come in Technicolor.
I pray you’re not clinging to a hope that is hollow, built on nothing more than experiences that are “fun.” There is more to life than what the fallen world sees. And yes, it is Technicolor. But you and I, those of us who shelter under the wings of Jesus, know that it’s not merely as stunning as Dorothy opening Auntie Em’s tired little door into the blazing world of Oz. It’s even better. It’s blinding.
So true…
Eh, as someone largely bed-bound with a chronic illness which also has brain fog, I’ve had plenty of my own “wait, what day is it?” uncertainty about time, and time passing weirdly (especially with the chronic-illness bonus of having to keep the house temp between 68F and 72F to reduce pain on the cold side and vomiting on the warm side – that *really* messes with remembering even what season it is).
But the people I knew (without kids) who had out-of-the-house routines – this is what happens M-F every morning, every evening, this is how weekends are constructed – were absolutely floored by how time just… squashed together… in their minds (morning/afternoon/evening, is it Monday, is it Thursday, what month even is it?) without their normal mental abacus of mile markers to work with, because normally all this structure is keeping track for them. What day did I do that? Oh, it was the day after the monthly staff meeting, which is the first Wednesday of the month, so it was [fill in the blank]. Or what time – many peoples’ work days come with chronometers, like “before the first coffee break of the day” or “right after lunch” or “just before I went home” – and when they were either abruptly unemployed or working from home and just eating when they felt hungry and working on things as it was feasible, then *poof* the ship’s bells were gone.
The second major thing that I’ve seen affect both Christians and non-Christians is the sheer stress. Right now, our local hospital has done at least four “surge plan” expansions for their COVID ward and yet *still* it is maxed out and four COVID patients are currently stowed in the ER (they’ll have more beds soon, though – they’re ripping out the carpet and doing the other things necessary to convert the building’s largest conference room to an additional ward). My aunt had COVID, needed ICU care, and from all accounts only survived because 1. that ICU bed was there and 2. they were not overextended, so they could give her the care she needed. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have died; more have been disabled either for a few weeks or a few months or longer; there have been financial crunches, financial crashes, evictions, job loss, family ruptures. These can cause grief even if you haven’t known someone who has died. (but a lot of people have known someone who has died this year as well)
And, lesser but still a mental strain, there are those who are introverts but who are suddenly no longer able to be alone because everyone else is around all the time, or extroverts who live alone, or introvert-extrovert pairs who normally thrive by having the extrovert go *out* for people time regularly.
And obviously health care professionals working overtime under heavy loads.
And, as you know, sometimes grief picks specific things – a particular loss hits you when someone’s birthday arrives, or when you smell a particular smell, or when you hit – or miss – a milestone. Sometimes the whole bundle of grief that goes with loss will wallop you because of one *specific* part of that loss; I’ve been missing my parents because first cancer and then the pandemic made travel inadvisable, but it didn’t really *hit* me until they were planning to hop to a dual-citizen country half the world away which has *vastly* better pandemic response, and I don’t actually know if I’ll see them again, period. I think them flying there improves the odds that I will see them again, in terms of statistical risk and whatnot, but the concept of them being an ocean away when I haven’t seen them in person for almost two years unplugged that particular grief well, even though it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in our daily interactions, except for time zone scheduling.
So, I guess, yes, anyone who is basically experiencing a Mid-Life Crisis from this interruption [Does anything I do have meaning? Will I hit my goals? I will not hit my goals, oh no!] is probably missing part of the gospel (which, however, is still sort of normal for Christians; we miss things and forget things and we are anxious or angry). But I do think that the functional problems with memory formation and tying things to time and being able to measure things, caused by a lack of ship’s bells and an increase in stress and grief at the way the world has gone or various personal losses or issues, are not specifically non-Christian problems to have.
Still: a lost year? Nope. A fairly unpleasant year, and undoubtedly more unpleasant for people for whom the life forced on them is both more different than their normal and more against the way they tick (and I feel so sorry for people who have to live in places without gardens or yards), but… not lost. But I can also see how people would feel that way, when their life has normally been very solidly measured out, but where the pandemic has stripped their accustomed short-term and long-term mile-markers, and when their memory formation has been further disrupted by a whole stack of factors. Maybe less lost than mis-filed; or blurry; or grief-weighted. But also maybe something many people don’t really have better words for than lost?