Time Flies—and Death Comes Speedily

The church I grew up in was largely Eastern European, filled wall to wall with Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks, and Serbians, to name just a few. Many of those belonging to the older generation, of which my own grandparents were a part, fled religious persecution in their homelands to North America with little more in their pockets than some lint, a few shekels, and a dusty old hymnal called the Zion’s Harp.

Though many of you haven’t so much as even heard of this hymnal, let alone the many songs contained therein, the Zion’s Harp has nonetheless scored much of my childhood and early adult years—indeed, I’ve quoted from it not a few times in my writing. However, there was always one song that drew no small amount of ridicule from me and my friends whenever it was called out during a song service. It was a slow, melancholic song that we esteemed as particularly dreadful, titled “Time Flies and Death Comes Speedily.” During our evening song service, the song was most commonly requested—or so we used to joke—by someone in the congregation who was themselves aged or else knocking on death’s door.

“Time flies and death comes speedily,

Uniting us, O Lord, with Thee!

Do Thou us here in time prepare

 Eternity’s glad day to share!”

As teenagers, my friends and I were awash with youthful pride, poking fun at weighty things we knew little about—completely ignorant that our life here below is “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). The dew was still afresh upon our heads; the road of life unfurling in a great spool before our feet, disappearing into the far-off horizon. We could quote you verses here and there from the Scriptures, all the while being completely unversed in this point: “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2). In our minds, we could afford to mock death because we were, at the time, so far removed from it.

These many years later, I have now come to realize—indeed, to taste and see for myself—that those aged brothers and sisters of mine were onto something. The older I get, and no matter how long the days themselves may drag, the years speed on with a ferocious swiftness that I am yet to get accustomed to. The melody may leave much to be desired, but the fact remains—“time flies, and death comes speedily.”

Indeed. Just earlier this year, our neighbor was struck dead on his riding lawn mower by a reckless teenager driving 190 km an hour—nearly four times the speed limit of our country road. He was in his fifties. That same week, a large passenger van in a neighboring community was in a collision, claiming the lives of five of their children, all aged twelve and under.

Not long before then, I ran into one of my old school friends at the gym. Now that I think of it, he was my oldest childhood friend, among the very first I had made all those years ago. We lived right down the street from each other growing up, and for many years we were nigh inseparable. But as so often happens after high school, we drifted apart in the years that followed. When we reconnected at the gym, we parted with the understanding that we’d see each other more often now that we worked out at the same place—little did we know that would be the moment of our final parting. As I left the gym that day, it crossed my mind that I should have shared the Gospel with him. “Next time,” I concluded. He died only a few weeks later, his heart stopping suddenly in that very gym.

My own father, the very week before he went home to be with the Lord, was advised by his team of doctors that he still had three to six months left, and that we should make the most of what time we had remaining. In the moment, that seemed like no time at all; if only we knew we were dealing in days and hours, not months.

Truly—“Time flies, and death comes speedily.” Apart from Christ, no matter how well-churched we may be, our lives remain but mist and vapor swirling around steeples and pews that have a greater claim to longevity than we. If our lives are to find any permanence—indeed, ultimate, purposeful permanence—it must be found in Christ, who alone has the words of eternal life. He gives both life and weight to our feeble frames—what brings these truths to bear on our hearts better or more clearly than the reality of death? Many a hell-bound soul was saved by a trip to the house of mourning where the recognition of their great need for salvation and Christ’s even greater desire to save shook hands for the first time.

How often we comfort ourselves—and others—with the thought that no man knoweth the day nor the hour of Christ’s return. That much is true (Matthew 24:36). However, let us never deceive ourselves into complacency, thinking that this gives us license to put off what ought to be done today. For just as we may not know the day nor the hour of His coming, so too are we in the dark regarding our own coming to Him. With His coming to us, there are at least certain signs and seasons which must first come to pass; but with our going to Him, no such warnings exist.

Today, my friends and I are no longer those teenagers we once were. We’re a bit greyer and stiffer than we were fifteen years ago. But by most metrics, we’re still young men. Nonetheless, we’ve tasted our share of loss and heartache since those early days when we were embarrassingly wet behind the ears in the ways of Christ. Over the years, we’ve returned again and again to the house of mourning—perhaps more than most our age, even. But Christ is faithful.

Just the other day our group of friends met up again after a short spell apart—something that’s increasingly harder and harder to do these days as our circle of friends broadens beyond ourselves to include spouses and little ones. In response to a story one of them was telling, I remarked on how much has changed in only a few short years with the almost reflexive reply, “How time flies...” Without skipping a beat, and perhaps just as involuntarily, I was met with two or three rejoinders of, “... and death comes speedily,” followed by wry smiles and eyes warm with understanding. In the short pause between this moment and the next, a stillness moved between us. A quiet, unspoken understanding filled the silence where joking once would have been in years past—the joy and lightheartedness of our fellowship wasn’t displaced, exactly, but added to. Those words mean something now—but once again, Christ is faithful.

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Photo by Eilis Garvey, Unsplash

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