lasts

by Zach Kincaid

It’s comforting to know that we define a “last time” after it occurs, and most often well into that pastoral time of reflection. Remember the last day of high school? The last hug from your dad? How about the last Christmas when you heard reindeer on your roof? Or the last Lenten journey? Do you recall the last time you thought your grandfather was bigger than life? Mine was shot by Indians, he said. Come to find out, it was too much cancer radiation that scarred his back. I like the Indian story.

By last times, don’t we mean dead times? If I asked you what book did you last read, you wouldn’t mean that you planned to stop reading altogether. Likely, there are a number of books you've since poked into or there's a list somewhere in your head. But there will come a time when last defines that last page of that last book.

Hoarding. I have this problem of trying to pull a Joshua. Sun, stop in your tracks. I want to dump all this time into one of those storehouses and just fall in. Stay there. Nothing move. Nothing change.

We can’t do that. Time keeps on going as it dies each second. Stab it now and the jab happens then. Try botoxing and it wrinkles out the other way. As the rocker states, "Time keeps on slippin' into the future."

So how do we stand on desks? The Christian knows the soul mysteriously holds a great reservoir of memory - the right heres and right nows branded onto the guts of identity, despite their Tralfamadorian* mixups. It doesn't mean we build silos. But we walk circumspect. We redeem the time while the world has its pulse.

And, if we know the last will be first so too let us be confident that the last times of our lives have another dawning inside the everlasting.

(*Re-read Slaughterhouse Five if this reference is remembered only vaguely.)