COUNTING DOWN IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD [F, 6-20-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—COUNTING DOWN IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD [F, 6-20-25]

 

 

One of the psychological problems of the covid 19 pandemic shutdown was that we couldn’t count it down… because we had no idea when it would end. That’s hard on us. We are a countdown people. But you can’t count down unless you have a definite time when you know that the present moment—the game, the year, the rocket blastoff—will end.

That is one of the reasons the shutdown lingers on still.  Not just the folks who have “long covid” symptoms. That’s bad enough. But all of us have the lingering marks of the shutdown on our souls. Because we did not get the closure of a countdown.

I remember well the first night I realized I could count down to retirement. I had reason to expect that I would not live long. I wanted to have at least a little time to spend with my grandchildren, and the only way I could get that was by retiring. It was dark. I was taking Waggs for her nightly walk. I knew the date when I could retire. I figured up the number of days until then. So, each night as Waggs and I walked by St. John the Baptist Church, I took a day off that number. Counting down gave me a reason to keep going on, when before the countdown started, the coming days had just been a messy morass without an end.

We use countdowns so often. The last seconds on the clock to end the game. New Year’s eve as the ball drops. Any day the astronauts blast off.

I think it’s why a lot of Christians get caught up in impossible schemes to figure out when the world will end. They just want a countdown to the end. They think it will give meaning to this present time.

We want that, that knowledge of when the world will end, because none of us can count down to the time when our own world will end, when we shall die. We are countdown people, but we have no way of counting down to the day of our own end.

The people who are doing okay in the aftermath of the covid 19 shutdown are those who have figured out how to accept an uncertain future. That’s how we accept an uncertain past, the shutdown that had no countdown, by accepting the uncertain future.

That way we do that is in the words of a phrase I have never liked much, but is useful, anyway: “Let go, and let God.” Or in the words of Charles Albert Tinley, “Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.” In other words: Trust.

Trust is not naivety or escapism. It is the only true realism. As Studs Terkel said, “We’re born to live. One is a realist if one hopes.”

John Robert McFarland