Life Is Long (and God Keeps Secrets)

lessons from trees, caves, and the Titanic

There’s a lot of value to remembering how short life is. We want to spend our days with intention and meaning because we never know which will be our last.

But I’ve realized recently that I need to acknowledge that life is also long. I’ve been wasting much of my life by trying so hard to not waste it. I tend to feel trapped when I don’t get to live as intentionally or purposefully as I feel I should be, or when I think about all the bad things that could happen that feel like they would totally wreck my life.

Those fears are fading, though, through a variety of experiences that all recently connected together in my head and heart, and I hope they make sense for you, too.

1. Titanic Survivors Still Did Stuff Afterwards

Last weekend I took my 9-year-old to the Titanic Museum because she says she’s read 17 books about it. The truthfulness of her claim is unverified, but she did know a lot about the “Unsinkable” Margaret Brown, who survived Titanic and went on to do many other incredible things, like philanthropy, social reform, providing medical aid in WWI, and apparently even saving guests from a hotel fire.
And she’s not the only person who lived an inspiring life after that deadly night. At the museum’s Wall of Survivors, you could read about the outcomes of all the people who survived the ship’s sinking. When you watch the movie and ponder how traumatic that whole experience must’ve been, you might think, “I’d never ever move past that.” But…they did. People started bakeries, had bunches of children…one guy even survived being a prisoner of war.

When you endure trauma or experience loss, you might never fully heal from it, and I don’t know if you should. It becomes part of who you are. But life is long enough that, even if your worst nightmare happens, it doesn’t mean your story is over. No story is over.

Finding freedom from the fear of worst-case scenarios makes me feel free, or at least not paralyzed. And, as someone who has confident and hope-filled views about eternity, I’m not afraid of what comes after this life, either. It almost makes me feel invincible.

2. God Keeps Secrets

Have you ever thought about all the cool things that happen that no one ever gets to see? I think about the wildly fun sections in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave that were most likely undiscovered until Stephen Bishop had the guts to cross the “Bottomless Pit” in the late 1800’s and discover that…the cave keeps going, and it’s really cool. So far 400 miles of the cave has been explored, but the park thinks there could possibly be hundreds more.

When we laughed and squeezed through those winding “Fat Man’s Misery” areas a couple months ago, I was blown away by how unnecessary they are. For thousands and thousands of years, no humans had explored this labyrinth made of stone. Bats and other cave creatures lived and died and stalactites and stalagmites formed…with the audience of only their Maker. I think He made this cool and secret thing because, well, He likes it.

God keeps secrets.

In Beth Moore’s incredible memoir, All My Knotted-Up Life, she shared some traumatic stories of things she and her husband had to deal with when they were children, and at the end she talked about some ways that God recently showed them that He saw them through all of that and He cared.

“What God is this who can keep a secret so long? What God is this, so unhurried to prove himself, so confident of his own spotless character, that he is unpressured by all the second-guessing of his own children?” -Beth Moore

Maybe there are some secrets God is keeping about your own story. Maybe He’s not in a hurry to prove Himself but He has tunnels and tunnels of joys hidden away for you somewhere.

3. Trees Are Old

After reading an epic novel about trees called The Overstory, I heard an interview with the author, Richard Powers. He has traveled and lived all over the world, yet he was so blown away by the old-growth forests in the Smoky Mountains that he decided to move to Townsend, TN. If a guy wins a Pulitzer prize for a book about trees and he gushes over a canopy that is only two hours from my house, I need to check it out. So I did. My 9-year-old and I sat by the creek and used water from the stream as our paint water, and we tried to depict what we saw.

Those. Trees. Are. Big. They’re gorgeous. They’re old.
They show me that being a sheltering, strong, deeply rooted presence takes time.

I might have ambitions and goals and they might be very good, but…something as lasting as a tree takes time.

Life is short—don’t assume you have forever to figure out the most important stuff—but it’s also long.

Long enough to focus fully on what’s in front of me and plan to focus on other desires in my heart later on.
Long enough to recover and still live a happy and meaningful life even if tragedy strikes.
Long enough to not waste my life feeling like I need to control everything that happens in it.
Long enough to trust God that, even if entire seasons feel like an absolute waste, I don’t know all His secrets.

All this has been a pretty big realization. I hope this helps you too.

Love,

Hope

P.S. Here are some more photos from the past couple weeks!

Trader Joe’s came through with the tulip display!