These Are the Good Old Days We'll Remember

From the moment we moved into our new home, this term was on my heart, and I knew I wanted it by the fireplace where we would see it when we came and went, when we sat and talked, when we played games and built towers out of blocks, when we watched endless cycles of cartoon movies, when we roasted marshmallows in the fireplace, and when we lived life.

These are the moments that form the season of life we will one day look back on when we are older and quietly alone; we’ll see it and say, “Wow . . . those were the good old days.”

We saw it as young teenagers, in love and eloping, and telling everyone we just wanted to grow up and learn life together. We saw it as a married couple for a decade while navigating life and exploring our little world and doing all the things we wanted to do. We kayaked and hiked and drove and flew and moved and experienced new places and loved and lived.

We saw it praying for babies and wondering if we would actually ever get to have our own family. We saw it bringing our first baby home and the miracle of her life and seeing the world through new eyes, and how magical it was.

We saw it bringing our second baby home and seeing the world again through new eyes, adjusting with perhaps growing pains to a new set of challenges you are never prepared for but that come with babies who are a little different but so miraculous and special.

And we see it now . . . in the thick of sleepless nights and a new home and finishing school and working and teaching a preschooler and endless loads of laundry and celebrating our marriage, which gets better every year still despite it all. It’s harder to see it maybe, the foggy magic of these days while we are living in them, but it is still there.

The one day aspect looms because life—each season—is seen and lived in the now. Every diaper, every dinner, every mess, every celebration, every miracle, every moment is getting you closer to seeing it. We are only being propelled forward, and we don’t get another chance to live these days no matter how much we will wish for just one more day to experience and remember it. Life is happening now. And this is where we are in our seasons of life.

But . . . we will see it later. When we are older and have enjoyed this life and are in the quiet once again and there is nowhere to be, nothing to do. When the kids we prayed for begin growing older and have more of their own life—dating and getting married, having babies of their own—and they come back home with their own family now, and they walk past the “good old days” sign once again. And we see them as they were when they were kids. And we watch, and we know, these are the good old days.

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12)