In so many ways, especially as I get older, a year seems like a short amount of time. I remember being young and feeling such frustration at how slowly time seemed to move. I would sit on a street corner with my buddies with nothing to do, bored out of my mind, waiting for time to pass.
Today, the moments of boredom are seldom and cherished. For the last two nights, I have woken up at 3:00 AM because some fallout from my most recent cold (it has been a hard month of lots of little sicknesses). While I have been frustrated at being unable to be able to get back to sleep, I have also treasured a couple hours of silence and quiet before all the children wake.
If life already seems to be going by quickly, just have children. One year makes a tremendous difference in the life of a child. One year ago, my youngest, Abi, could not walk. Now she runs from one end of the house to the other. A year ago, my son couldn’t pronounce his ‘R’ or ‘TH’ sound. Suddenly the boy is speaking almost perfectly. Pictures from just a few months ago show children that are smaller and less developed.
This period of my life is about building. A year ago we got chickens. We have added to our flock. We are now chicken people; I cannot imagine ever going back. A year ago, I had just started my own podcast that was lucky to get a dozen views/clicks. Today it is not uncommon for a new piece of content to get 2,000 engagements in a day. A year ago, my children’s ministry was in shambles. Today, we have a solid crew of children growing in faith. A year ago, we did not know if our churches would be able to manage or afford disaffiliation. Today, we stand on the other side, free and better positioned than ever.
My wife has changed more than anyone I have known over time. When we met, she was almost a different person entirely than who she is today. In the last year, she has become a main leader in a home school co-op and a meal sharing program, while continuing to lead discipleship and prayer ministries. This girl who once felt great awkwardness at leading in much of any capacity is suddenly touching hundreds of lives each week. This young mother I once knew, without any friends’ kids for her children to play with, has created a network of over 30 well-balanced children for our children to learn and grow alongside of. As of a year ago, Sara Beth had grown and nurtured four Rickman children. Today, she carries a fifth. The woman is a builder.
Someday I will look back on this stage of my life and feel great distance from it. Yet, even now, I look around at my life and cannot absorb all the dynamism and change. I look at each of my children and almost feel as though I’m thinking, “Oh yes, this is what this one looks like at this age,” as though I am looking at them from eternity. I can barely remember what each one looked like at previous stages. I feel like their future selves are almost equally a shadow of myself, even though those people have not come to fruition yet. I simultaneously mourn the loss of 2-year-old Jesse and am so excited to see what 12-year-old Jesse is like. Only the orientation towards the future sometimes feels more like remembering. Sometimes, sitting in my chair after dinner, watching my wife and children interact and play, I feel like I’m watching a family movie from many years ago. I stand far away.
Right now, the toddler is the one grabbing me and making me be in the present. I am the one she needs when she wakes, when she is sleepy, when she is bored, when she is afraid or uncomfortable. Half of the time that I am home, the girl is in my arms. This was the case for each of my children during these years. Each of them has spent hours in my arms, directing my footsteps around the house, or in my bed, sleeping next to me. Yet it is widely known that children forget everything that happens to them under the age of three. My children will not remember all of the physical comfort, presence, and affection I have given them. Just as bad, I have all but forgotten all of those hours with the previous children, as well. My parents were the same. For the first few years of my early adulthood, I would ask them if they remembered me being like my kids. I stopped asking because they don’t remember. Life is fleeting. Even when one records it on video, as I do, the depictions of the past become somewhat alienated in the present.
“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
- 2 Peter 3:8
This scripture has echoed in the back of my mind since I read it over a decade ago as an adult. It has informed my understanding of predestination and eternity. It indicates to me that God’s experience of time is not like ours, and that perhaps it is not even linear. This idea, once so ridiculous to me, has now informed how I personally experience time. Past, present, and future coming together in the act of congregational worship has gradually impacted more of my life, such that, as my life is increasingly all a testament to my love and worship of Christ Jesus, so my life is also very mixed up between the past and the future. Or at least it feels that way. This is partly what I was grasping at last week when reflecting on the nature of God, and how his presence and perception of time, or rather his perfect memory in the midst of it, gives comfort to those of us ravaged by time.
This year was a big year for me. I put myself on trial in a way that I had been wondering about for years and found myself able, by the power of God, to do something that not many thought was possible. This year was a big year for local churches. I got to watch God be faithful to so many communities of faith that put themselves at great risk to seek him. Despite the trials of American society in previous years, these churches are holding together, growing together, refusing to be intimidated by seemingly insurmountable threats. Despite huge machines bent of destruction of the old, we have seen voices rise that seem immune to the toxins of our present age. I believe we are seeing many American churches and leaders rediscover the boldness of God.
2023 was a relatively tame year compared to the preceding ones. After Covid, lockdowns, the rapid rise of racialism, the rebellion of progressives in the UMC, the last presidential election, massive inflation…there were so many crises to navigate that kept us low for a long time. Here, at the end of 2023, despite the violence in other parts of the world, things feel a little more solid here than they have for some time. The market seems to be stabilizing. I cannot help but wonder if this is the relative calm before a storm…
The next year is intimidating. A presidential election in America and a General Conference in The United Methodist Church promise to greatly increase pressures and tensions in our country. War in Ukraine and Israel has been used to surruptitiously act around the globe by many bad actors. 2024 holds much potential for things to spill over greatly. Unchecked immigration and surging racialism promise great unrest across the post-Christian West. This could be the year our Lord Jesus returns to bring his Kingdom to earth. It could also be another year in which, amidst all of the cries of anguish and pain, we cry ‘maranatha!’ and find, as generations before us have found, that God is faithful to save.
My prayers are for unity of God’s church, reconciliation and understanding throughout the world, and exposure of those powers and principalities that seek to destroy us. One of the most disturbing things about my life in recent years has been in learning about the forces of darkness that have amassed in the modern world. Yet a foundational article of faith is that our God prevails, and no stronghold can withstand him. Despite the threat of the night, we are with the day. The darkness cannot comprehend the light.
One of the other things that has changed this year has been this Substack, which has grown to 220 subscribers, 7 of whom actually pay for my weekly reflections. This is part of a larger engagement, involving PlainSpoken, in which I have been publicly and critically engaging the world through a conservative Methodist lens. A year ago, this was all a dream. Today, we see an increasingly vital and engaged movement of people reclaim the Methodist heritage. I am excited to keep honing myself as an instrument of the Lord, now with several faithful and intelligent friends in tow. God is so good.
I once grew frustrated every year in these days after Christmastide begins. Everyone seems lazy and absent. Nothing is happening. Even if I schedule meetings or special events, few show up. This year, life made me slow down with all of these sicknesses. And the commitments I have made with the projects I have begun require that I sit down and take stock of them, setting goals and hopes for the future. I realize this is probably how life is best spent during this season for people seeking to be builders.
I realize it isn’t I who is really building. It is the Lord who builds. He gives, and he takes away. He prospers, and he depletes. Without him, I can build nothing. I rejoice, however, to be at the mercy of his guiding hands. My only desire is to be an instrument of his gospel in this hurting world. I grow increasingly tired of these folks who get excited about “building the Kingdom.” It is Christ who brings his Kingdom. I am but a happy worker. Sometimes I’m a planter, sometimes just a waterer; it is God who gives the growth. One of the prayers I’m saying for this coming year is: May I continue to decrease, that the Lord may increase in my life.
If you have read this reflection, I hope you likewise take the time to take stock of how much has changed for you in the last year. Whether it has been a year of building and moving forward, or failing and moving backward, God has been faithful. Let us not bargain with God, but resolve to unconditionally and happily serve him, whether or not he gives growth. I am certain that 2024 is to be a much more difficult year for many than it was this year. We must steel ourselves, lest we be found too soft to endure the time of trial.
A day is coming on which all things will be tried by fire. Only those things that are entirely, purely in Christ will endure. This is the purpose of the church: To bring all whom Christ is calling into the faithful covenant community of salvation. There is much work to be done. Let us do it joyfully together in the coming year, even as satan gnashes his teeth and the world clenches its fists. May we confidently, boldly, prevail in the name of Christ. May God bless you in your ministry. We are one in Christ.