Sawdust trails lace lakeside mountain air with memory’s scent. Melodious waves of lake water lick the shore, reverberating beneath ancient boathouse beams. Purple mountains stretch into sunrise skies “of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” These may not be the golden shores, but they’re as close as I’ll get in this life.

Many of my happiest memories center in the heart of the Adirondacks. Splashing with my siblings—due to the 15-year spread between us, trips to the lake provided one of the few times when we all played together. Teaching my wife to water-ski where I’d learned years earlier. Introducing my children to my happy place, and watching each in turn love it as I do. This isn’t just joy, but shared joy.

But in the most joyous times, we often feel the stab of passing time. What happens to shared joy when those who share it leave?

Paradox of Joy

Change relentlessly threatens joy. It’s all the more tenuous when the joy involves people. Though my family’s lake house is my “happy place,” it’s already a different place than I remember. That’s true physically. Even as modern appliances unseat antiquity’s charm, decaying wood proclaims death’s steady advance. But worse, it’s true relationally too. When I look around, I mourn the missing faces taken by death, divorce, and irreconcilable disagreements.

In the most joyous times, we often feel the stab of passing time.

Even those who remain don’t remain unchanged. Faces streaked with age. Knees that can’t bear the weight of waterskiing any longer. Families grown so large we can’t all gather at the same time. (Have I already splashed with my siblings for the last time? I mourn that possibility even as I rejoice that we now get to watch our children splash with their siblings.) Will my dad, knocking on the door of his ninth decade, be able to drive the boat when my youngest learns to water-ski like he has for every other grandchild? Tempus fugit, and the weight of it presses on me like stones crushing “the ooze of oil” from olives.

I feel the pain of inconsolable longing even in Lake Placid. Joy and sorrow commingle in bewildering ways. Each glorious, holy, and mundane moment throbs with the ache of immortality. C. S. Lewis’s Orual captures the paradox of this joy: “It was when I was happiest that I longed most. And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it.” Joy sets us longing for more joy, but time’s passing threatens even the original. That’s the ache we feel.

What can this ache, this longing, teach us that we might number and live our days aright (Ps. 90:12)?

Two Lessons

1. The ache reminds us we’re made for eternity.

“Thou madest man, he knows not why, / He thinks he was not made to die,” Tennyson rightly laments. We grieve time’s slow but relentless march because we know in our depths that death’s an indignity inflicted on those meant for more. What’s the alternative? Do we really “give birth astride of a grave,” as Samuel Beckett morosely asserts? Does Hemingway have it right when he says life’s “just a dirty trick, a short journey from nothingness to nothingness”?

I can’t see it. The ache, the inconsolable longing, resonates with heaven’s call. God set eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). That’s why the loss that change brings offends. That’s why the wise visit mourning’s house (7:4), not to scratch some macabre itch but because grief stirs hope for consummation.

2. The ache teaches us to live with holy urgency.

We’ll live forever, but not this life forever. Some opportunities will be lost eternally when we pass through splendorous gates. Thus, immortality teaches not apathy but zealous (and zealously ordered) activity. God doesn’t owe us tomorrow. None we love is promised a long, full life. That sobers our perspective and focuses our priorities.

We devote ourselves to what will endure eternally: to the people God has placed in our lives who need words of encouragement, equipping, and evangelism, to the tasks God has given us to complete as good and faithful stewards of his precious gifts.

Almost Heaven

When I consider the little left to me of my “threescore years and ten,” I find renewed passion to live well today. What drove Housman to cherish cherry blossoms drives me to pour myself out for the glory of God and the good of others. Have I left necessary words—apology, forgiveness, reconciliation, rebuke, or invitation—unspoken? Have I frittered precious time away on frivolous, vain, or idolatrous pursuits instead of investing it in the immortal beloveds within my reach? Whom should I call today, gather with tomorrow, host next weekend? Life’s too short to leave unordered.

Thus, with the urgent ache of immortality pulsing within us, we prepare for heaven. “Almost heaven, West Virginia,” John Denver sang about his happy place. But that’s just it. It’s almost heaven—not heaven itself. This life falls short, fails to heal the old ache, precisely because time carries joy from us like a river rushing debris downstream. We want to freeze a moment in time, enjoy it forever, but it slips from us like sand from loose fingers. And even if we could grasp it, would we want to? Surely not, for we want our children to grow up, to mature, to move on to their own moments of transient transcendence.

Time’s passing threatens abiding joy, so there must be a joy beneath, behind, beyond. We must seek that instead.

So this can’t be it. As Lewis wrote, these moments aren’t “the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” Like the woman at the well, we’re also drinking water that leaves us parched in the end. Unquenchable thirst teaches us to seek eternal satisfaction. If what we seek leaves us disappointed, our desires are too small. Time’s passing threatens abiding joy, so there must be a joy beneath, behind, beyond. We must seek that instead.

Now we understand the ache, the inconsolable longing for joy, the pang of passing time. In it, God shows us our want—our lack and our desire. All this can’t be it, won’t do it. But Jesus takes us that final step. It’s not what I’m lacking but Whom I desire. Jesus alone will satisfy to the uttermost. I will find my joy in him and dedicate this life’s “walking shadow” to seeing others savor the Savior too.