When a Woodmont group went to Guatemala in 2019, we visited a massive local cemetery on All Saints Day. In the early morning hours, the place was filled with people there to lay flowers at tombs, sing songs, and remember their loved ones who were no longer there. It was a reminder that life is short, that—as we hear on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent—you and I are dust and to dust we will return.

As we tried to make our way out through crowded corridors, the morning son peaked over the mountain. And silly as it is, I thought about a scene from Avengers: Endgame. I totally knew it was coming and it still completely knocked the wind out of me.

At the end of the previous movie, an intergalactic villain known as Thanos wiped out half of the living beings in the universe. So the whole premise of Endgame was the remaining heroes desperately trying to find a way to bring back all of those lost lives. We knew that they would succeed. Spider-Man had been turned to dust, but he had a movie coming out later in the summer so we knew that he would somehow be resurrected.

I remember one summer when we were kids, my brother and I were bobbing in the ocean when he asked, “If God is outside of time and we are with God when we’re in heaven, then couldn’t we be watching ourselves right now?” That broke my brain a little bit. Periodic reminder that my little brother and sister are consistently brilliant people.

I don’t know what I believe about God and time nor do I want to suggest that was the endocarp to my brother’s theology on the subject, but that memory popped into my head today. I have been thinking a lot today about how we assign names and numbers to make sense of the ever-flowing stream of time. The months, days, and years that we have placed on time in concert with the earth’s rhythms are why I am 37 years old instead of eighteen and a half or 148. Today is Wednesday, but someone at some point could have just as easily decided that this day would be called Ralph.

All of that sounds very much like some zoned out late night college dorm room conversation. Being 148 years old on this gray Ralph morning is not why time is on my mind. It’s because it is Holy Week. It is that moment in time when we mark out and remember the final week of Jesus’ earthly ministry: his triumphal entry, his sharing in a last supper, his crucifixion, and resurrection. It is during this time of looking back and forward and within that time becomes a bit unmoored.

As I write this, I am sitting on the floor in the room of my childhood home. You are laying on a mattress intently reading a Scooby-Doo book as you wind down for bed. I close my eyes and think about when we first met you eight years ago. How you fit in our arms. How your face was round and squished up. Today you seem impossibly big and impossibly old, but I think that is how all parents feel on their kid’s birthday.

We were walking in a park the other day with your grandparents and you did something that you have done on our many other walks in this pandemic year. You slipped your hand into mine and held it as we walked along. Your animated voice bouncing from one idea to another as your other hand waved and gesticulated in all directions.

I’m thankful each time it happens because I know moments like that probably aren’t long for this world. I hope and know that others will take its place; other gestures and moments that connect us as you grow up. But those times when you put your hand in mine grounds me. It calms me in a world that has been anything but calm. It’s a reminder that when everything is changing that you will always be my son, I will always be your dad, and there is a love that holds us together. Those reminders are a gift.

It’s NCAA Tournament time again. And that means that it is time for me to go down my annual rabbit hole in which I fill out a bracket based on the question, “Which team’s mascot would win in a one-on-one fight?” After doing an Ultimate Bracket last year when there was no NCAA Tournament, I decided this year to film myself going through this year’s entries as I explain which mascot I believe should be crowned champion of Mascot Madness 2021.

The de facto joke (if you can call it that) as we enter into Lent is that no one wants to give anything up because we have already given up so much in the last year. We’ve been in Lent since mid-March. We had to give up time with friends, going to restaurants or the movies, seeing our favorite teams play, and so much more. Lent came for us, elevated its game, and then stuck around for well past forty days.

One of the refrains of Ash Wednesday—this first day of Lent—is “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.” I usually think about that in very narrow terms. The minister says it to me as she or he imposes the ashes on my forehead. Yet this last year has been a reminder that all of this is dust. The world as you and I know it can vanish with a gust of wind: a pandemic, a diagnosis, a fractured relationship, anything. Our world is dust.

What do you do when you and all around you is dust? I guess that you could sit in the ashes and mourn its fleeting nature. Or you could just throw caution to the wind and roll around in as much dirt as you can while the getting is good. You could grow numb to the seeming meaninglessness of this whole random venture. Sometimes we feel like doing all three of these things in one Tuesday.

I'm still up because both my boys woke up in the middle of the night, so I'm sitting with them as they fall back asleep. I'm going to treat this like it's still Wednesday because in the chaos of this day I forgot that it was Epiphany, which is when we remember the Magi bringing gifts to the Christ Child.

I was explaining to my boys the other day that we don't know how old Jesus was when these visitors arrived. We only know they came from the East and, in Asia, the East covers a lot of territory. We don't know how many there were.

What we do know is these individuals of high honor lavished this young family with immensely valuable gifts. That they knelt before a child and simply being in his presence brought them great joy. We know that they did not tell a tyrant king desperate to hold on to power where that child was.

Today was supposed to be rainy and dreary. But it wasn’t. The rain came through more quickly and thoroughly washed away the last vestiges of 2020. And this morning the sun broke through the clouds. The air felt like spring. It was a new day in a new year.

Of course, this does not mean anything in the grand scheme of the world. A beautiful January 1 in one town does not mean that the tide has turned any more than the flipping of the calendar magically changes our circumstances. The things that made last year so difficult stubbornly still exist: the pandemic and the maddening number of people who don’t take it seriously, the leaders tilting at razor-bladed windmills for political gain, the sickness, the dying, the heartbreak.

The lingering of the past year made me stop in my tracks this morning. It literally stopped me. I took advantage of the beautiful morning and went on a new year’s run. The route I usually run takes me near 2nd Avenue where a suicide bomber set off a massive explosion on Christmas Day. Several streets downtown are still closed which meant that I had to stop and figure out a different way to find my way home. Despite the cleansing rain and the bright new day, the echoes of a harsh year still resonated.