Love Through Time

“I hear the screen door slam and I peer above the grass. A child is running, pell mell, and as it comes down the path through the waving grass my heart twists and Clare bursts into the clearing.” -page 35, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger

When I remember this time in my marriage, one of the moments I hope will come to mind is walking with D in our favorite park an hour before dusk last Saturday. The park was green, green fields and trees, the air crisp, the sky overcast but everything lit like we were in another world. We jogged our usual route (stopping when I got the now-familiar irrational urge to pee), walked the rest, explored a skipping stone beach, threw a Frisbee. We underwent a mission to find my lost bandanna and actually discovered it at the spot where D joked about being too tired to run but then took off and I had to dash to catch up.

In preparation for our vacation next week I indulged in buying a book for the plane and beach, as usual one I’d read before and liked enough to add to the collection. I like the creative scope of the story. It made me imagine what it would be like to go back in time and meet D as a child or a teenager. I think about the hurts and adventures and proclivities I would discover. I’m sure he would have liked the outdoors just as much, probably thrown a Frisbee or ball the same way. He would probably still really like noodles and smart girls. It would be interesting to see the changes over time.

Much of the purpose of marriage seems to be about that: focusing on the other in a way unrelated to what they can do for you. Thinking instead about who they are, what made them who they are, what they are becoming, what they can become. Ephesians talks about how marriage is to sanctify and present the other blameless: for the eternity in which he will not be my husband, but just himself, his full self. And part of that self will be a result of what I’ve been able to see, understand, and create in him, because of the power and covenant of the relationship we had here on earth.

If I could time travel, I suppose that would be the neatest thing of all to see. I would love to see the five-year-old D lumber across a field, but how inspiring would it be to see his glory-self that exists for all eternity? I wonder how, being beyond all time, God loves us. There must be a depth to that love I cannot understand. As a child I couldn’t think past a few days; now I can hardly grasp a few decades, much less the scope of my life for eternity. Yet that is the way in which God knows of and loves me, in all the past and all the never-ending future. Food for thought.

Week Twenty-Four