It’s been one whole rotation around the sun without my dad. (Or it will be about midnight.) It has flown by for me. But for Dad, outside the realm of time in the presence of God…well, I wonder what that must be like?

I sometimes think that deaths close to home are God’s kind way of helping us relinquish our death grip on our own lives here—lived under the tyranny of the clock, the relentless passing of seconds and minutes and hours and days, and all the ravages its progression brings.

I have a picture in my head of me holding a fistful of balloon strings, smiling up at the balloons’ bright colors. One by one, the strings break and their balloons disappear into the sky. I’ve lost five so far, and I have a peculiar feeling that when the last one gets loose, I may float away with it…happily, I believe.

I still don’t wish him back, though I miss him. Each time I think of him, I remember that his joy is complete as mine will be one day. The tyranny of the clock he used to tell me of so often is broken. Now, he just…lives. He lives like God created humans to live in the beginning. No hurry, no pressure to finish on time, no inevitable decline.

“There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land
He has strayed like a thief or a lover…
Glory to God in the lowest!”
--G. K. Chesterton

Time and the terminal land. We are all terminal. Our sickness is sin, and it always kills us. If Jesus had not done this—come down low and submitted himself to Slavedriver Time, a thing of His own creation—I would have no hope. But because He did, Time is His servant to bring me to my death. Not my end, you know, but my beginning.

Thank you, Dad, for helping me “get my head into the heavens” as Chesterton would say. Thank you for setting me on my way to explore and think and learn all of these beautiful things about God.

“Heaven is not far though far the sky
Overarching earth and main.
It takes not long to live and die…
Die, revive, and rise again.”
--Anonymous

I will see you “soon.” Maybe in ten years. Maybe in fifty. But soon.