👈 Back to the Future 👉

The last living relative of my parents’ generation died last month. Aunt Lil was 101. That milestone struck a nerve. My generation is firmly in the OG camp now. Time marches on.

Time travel has been a popular fascination of fiction writing, movies, and television. Who hasn’t daydreamed about traveling back or forward in time? Lately, time travel has been an unwelcome daily occurrence for me.

Something happens during the night, and when I wake up each morning, the guy in my mind is 35, until he starts to move around or looks in the mirror. Who is that? Or, how did this happen?

It’s a bit of an unwelcome adjustment, but the alternative is worse: the guy in the mirror is the same guy in my mind. 😂

I used to think time travel meant going back to visit the past. Lately, I’m realizing the real shock is waking up in the future and discovering that I am now one of the people I used to think of as old.

Then Croatia gave that strange feeling a place to stand.

On our recent trip, we were blessed to tour the very church where my grandparents were married about 120 years ago. It is a beautiful country church high on a hill overlooking the village of Zakanje. As nice as that scene was, nothing could have prepared us for the beauty on the inside. The beauty had the power to transport us in our imagination to a different time.

Translation: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will!”

Here we were, standing in a place where our future began decades before we existed. Our grandparents made vows there 120 years ago, and somehow, by the grace of God, we were standing there, carrying their story forward.

That is not just “back to the past.”

That is back to the future.

Standing in that church, I realized we were not just visiting the past. We were standing in the future our grandparents could not see, carrying a story they helped begin.

That is what time does. It moves the generations along. Aunt Lil’s passing reminded me that the baton has moved again. We are not simply the children and grandchildren anymore. We are becoming the elders, the witnesses, the stewards of the story.

And yet, for followers of Jesus, aging is not only subtraction. Paul says, “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

The mirror tells one truth. The Spirit tells another. Both are real, but only one gets the final word.

Run the play: receive the story with gratitude, carry it with faithfulness, and pass on the only name that can carry every generation home.

Jesus.

Finding Our Place in the Story

1. Where have you recently become more aware that time is moving you into a new season of responsibility or influence?
2. Who helped carry the story of faith before you, and how can you honor their investment by carrying it forward?
3. What is one way you can intentionally pass Jesus to the next generation this week?