How to Accept the Passing of Time with Children
On the end of summer, children aging, and missed opportunities
The summer break is coming to an end for me and my family, which means that another season of memory-making is closing, my children are getting older, and I have to come to terms with how I spent my precious time with my family. Which means I have to come to terms with regret, because I didn’t always spend it well. Even when I wasn’t busy on my phone or distracted or anxious, I wasn’t always present and enjoying my family. I was elsewhere, worried about other things. And now that time is past and we’re all a little older and my children have moved one step closer to adulthood and I feel like I have so little to show for it. But this is the natural state of things. If you love well—love life, children, a spouse, friends, this creation—you will feel an ache at the passing of time, an acknowledgement that no matter how attentive and present and intentional you have been, you have still missed it. The beauty of the moment eluded you. You got a glimpse, but only enough to miss it once it was gone. And now you are left only with a fading memory. And how can that ever be enough? This, it seems to me, is a serious problem for human existence: how to deal with the passing of time.
One side of this problem is how to deal with the problem with the redemption of corrupted time: traumas, suffering, sorrow, etc. How do we reconcile those bad experiences in our lives? But the other side of the problem is how to deal with the passing of good experiences. And that’s what I’m focused on here. How do I accept the fact that my children will never sit in my lap and beg for me to read Dr. Seuss to them again? How do I accept the fact that during those years I was so distracted and tired and anxious that I didn’t properly enjoy it? In other words, how do we accept the passing of time, the loss of all that is precious to us, eventually? The answer, I believe, is that we don’t lose everything precious. Rather, those glimpses of beauty and goodness are “hints and guesses” at what awaits us in glory. To accept the passing of time is to accept that there is no earthly gathering together of moments and memories, no successful hoarding that can protect you from loss. There is only the hope that in Christ we may have life abundantly. And in the fullness of time all things will be reconciled to him. So our duty is to live faithfully in the moment, allowing time to pass, not greedily, but with gratitude for every moment, knowing that it is a gift.
Every once in a while, an older person will look at me with my kids and tell me, “Enjoy it while you can. They grow up fast.” I know they mean well, and I know they are right, but this wisdom has never done anything but produce anxiety and guilt in me. Because the process of raising children is tiring, stressful work. And I have my own burdens to carry on top of that. So being told that I’m supposed to be treasuring this moment when I’m anxious and exhausted is hard to hear. And yet, if I could go back in time and talk to my early-parenting self, the one thing I would tell him is to take care of his mental health so that he could be more present. I have a lot of regrets. I guess we all do. So those older people are not entirely wrong.
What makes it so hard to hear these words is that we know that there is something inexpressibly precious about these moments, but we also know that we are overwhelmed and it’s hard to be present. And part of our guilt is that we know we have already missed many similar moments in the past by distracting ourselves with our phones or with the worries of life. Plus, life itself demands that you can’t take in all that is beautiful around you. Laundry must be done. Dishes must be done. Dinner must be made. The mundane must be attended to. And while there are moments of beauty there, too, mostly it is toil.
Of course, the corporate world tries to help us fight this problem by giving us infinite abilities to capture memories and remind ourselves of memories. Our phones remind us of past trips and people and experiences. Facebook reminds us of memories, becoming a kind of automatic digital scrapbook, always pulling us into the past.
And there is something good and beautiful about capturing memories. I treasure photos of my children, family, friends, and pets. They ground me in the story I’m a part of. They remind me of where I’ve been, and who I belong to, and who I’ve loved, and who has loved me. Done rightly, this kind of remembering, whether in scrapbooking, or photo albums, or slide shows remind us of our place in the world.
It is possible to go too far and live in your memories or try to hoard them. I think the difference here is fear, a fear of losing the past, a fear that without your captured memories you will no longer be you, or you will have lost the beauty and goodness of your life.
I don’t think that’s how life works. I don’t think we ever really lose the good things in this life, even when we forget them. If they truly are good and beautiful, then they are echoes of Glory. And in which case, we will experience those echoes fully in Glory. Which is not to say that your favorite toy as a child will be waiting for you in Glorified Form in Heaven, but that the joy and imagination and excitement and pleasure you experienced from that toy has its fullness in Heaven. So nothing good is ever really lost.
The other important thing for Christians to remember is that this life is not everything. If it were, if the beauty and joy and goodness of this life were all that we had, then we had been desperately hoard all our memories and intensely experience everything. But that’s not the case. This isn’t our one shot at experiencing fullness of life. It’s a shadow of fullness.
This is not a reason to ignore the importance of the present moment or to forget memorable moments in our lives. On the contrary, because God sustains us moment-by-moment in an act of love and compassion, we have a responsibility to treat each moment with solemnity and joy. We should strive to live in the present moment and not be distracted. And it is right and good of us to commemorate notable moments in our lives and the lives of our children. But we do all this while acknowledging that we can’t keep it all in our memories. That we can’t fully experience it all. That we can’t capture it all. That more than anything, we don’t need to. All things are reconciled in Christ, not in your memory. And that has to be enough.
(This article was originally published on Dr. Noble’s Substack, You Are Not Your Own, on July 28, 2025.)
- How to Accept the Passing of Time with Children - September 3, 2025
Favorite Posts
Making the World More Beautiful (with Miss Rumphius)
Anticipating The Right-Side-Up World Through Imagination
Imaginations Should Be Exercised
Why Story Warren?