Someone took a photo of me the other day, a headshot for author purposes, and looking at it, I was struck by the fine lines around my eyes. I know thirty-one isn’t “old” and in a few years I will want to pat myself on the head and say, “You silly, young thing,” BUT the truth remains—those lines were not there ten years ago. The passage of time is slipping into my face, like ink blotting through a page, and I’m both mesmerized and conflicted.

Time, that essential measurement of life, is a finite space into which I must fit maturity and understanding. Lessons learned. Battles won. In the time it took for these lines to appear, nearly everything that I’ve learned has come experientially. There’s no way to become an expert simply by being told. I can read instructions in a book on being a “loving wife,” or “relating empathetically, “or enduring adversity”—but the reality of them only comes through the doing.

No one could tell me how to grow up. I simply had to do it. 

The same photographer of my headshot also took a family photo—me, my husband, a little boy of nearly three, and a tiny daughter. Both of these children are so exquisitely beautiful to me that I keep staring into their faces, wondering at their existence. I couldn’t have known for sure they were coming. I had hoped, but there was no definitive promise.

But what if I could’ve seen them at the beginning of the story? What if I could’ve known that the path would lead me here? Would I have wept and doubted nearly as much?

Their existence shifts my past into a wiser perspective. My perceived failures, mistakes, and heartache don’t seem nearly as earth-shattering. I’ve had plenty of days when I thought I was about as useful or intelligent as a weed. Like when I failed my Learner’s permit test because I didn’t know how many feet a car should stop behind a school bus (the humiliation!). Or when I didn’t get the job interview or the book deal. It no longer bothers me that my older sisters had an instinctive ability to make small talk with boys while I sat in the corner reading Ivanhoe.

But motherhood even touches the more serious events that still sting or that I still regret. Moments I had control over, like the people I hurt out of selfishness. Or the moments I had no control over, like the spring time baby who would be four years old now, whom I still so deeply love and miss.

Because although my children’s existence doesn’t make those things “okay,” they bring a context to the journey. A light at the end of a twisted tunnel.

I wish I could go back in time and let myself see this family photo, just for a moment, and say—Look at your future. I wish I could’ve let myself know what was coming. That the grief wouldn’t last. The tears wouldn’t last. The confusion about which path to take. 

But nothing in life works this way. There’s no crystal ball. Instead, we’re molded by the uncertainty. 

In the same way my body knows it is trapped by time, my soul senses its imperviousness to age. Maybe that’s why the elderly can say they feel eighteen on the inside. 

I’ve always been me. The nine-year-old running barefoot in the woods. The sixteen-year-old bruising her knees on the basketball court. The twenty-eight-year-old feverishly writing while her baby sleeps. In twenty years, I may have deeply carved laugh lines and flabby elbows, but I’ll still be me. Variations on a theme.

And ironically, I know the ending of the story of me. I know what will come. It’s in a book. 

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’” (Rev. 21:3-5)

I so easily forget what lies before me. I lose a grasp on the essential truth that underpins all my hope—that I am a human-being made in the image of God, purchased and redeemed by his son Jesus. I forget that my worth and meaning are independent from my accomplishments and skillsets. I lose sight of the fact that I’m eternal. That my body will die, but there’s something more intrinsic to my personhood than just a biologic neural network that achieved consciousness.

I forget that the terrible former things will pass away. That God himself will wipe away every tear.

Even if I’d seen a photo of Jack and Laura, would I have believed? Because I do know the ending of the big story, in black and white, and I still can’t hold onto it. I doubt. I turn my head and squint. Is that photograph real? Is it AI? 

I would’ve doubted. Just like I have moments where I doubt the end of all of our stories. 

In the daily horrors of the world we live in, Jesus doesn’t always feel eminently present.  But the universe and reality are so much more than what we can feel. They’re so much more than our three pound brains can process. 

I don’t want these lines in my face to be meaningless. I want each one to be earned and worthwhile, wrung from doing, not from watching. I want to grow old in a way that uses my temporary body as a tool for growth and discipline and depth. I want to embrace wrinkles in hopes that someday the perishable will be clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. “Then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’” (I Cor. 15:54)