Your Life Runs Away

Moist summer greens dry into yellows, oranges, and reds. Soon, leaves swirl down in wind that has a bite. Birds fly south overhead. Light softens as the days shorten. Sweaters and fleeces come out. It’s fall. I love it! Yet every autumn pierces me. The year is ending — already. All these changes remind me that I’m ending too. I’m just as brief as a leaf’s final ride to the ground. Life runs away like time. But where does it go?

Humans are the only creatures on earth aware that we will die. We alone grieve the dying of a day, a season, or a life. Like a cold stripe in the warm water of a summer lake, the first chill of fall shocks us with the fact of mortality.

This pain, however, can be a gift. Christians, after all, are realists. We need not run from this ever-surprising sorrow. The theme of memento mori (“remember death”) has long been part of Christian wisdom. For the more completely we accept its reality, the more beautiful we find our hope in Christ to be. For these next few moments, let’s contrast perspectives about the passings of time and life through two writers whose work has endured.

Frost’s Stream That Runs Away

Robert Frost wrote a poem as a conversation between a young couple standing by a rushing stream. In “West-Running Brook,” he makes the connection between the water flowing away and our own mortality. He describes life as “the stream of everything that runs away.” “[Existence] seriously, sadly runs away / To fill the abyss’ void with emptiness,” he writes. He depicts that existence as “the universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness.”

This piques my autumnal melancholy. All life hurries away — and maybe it’s just going into sheer nothingness. The void of death never gets filled because all we throw into it is the emptiness of nonexistence. Maybe these brief years are all there is to us.

Frost’s poem, however, doesn’t end in complete bleakness. As they watch the brook, the couple notices a continuous, small white patch amid the swift-flowing dark water. They realize the stream hits a rock just below its surface. There, perpetually, the water rises up and falls backward on itself. It’s as if something in the stream rushing away takes a glance toward where it has been.

The pair discusses what this wave means. It feels somehow like a sign for them. One says, “It is this backward motion toward the source, / Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in.” They’re saying that our awareness of living and dying — our pondering of what it means (even if it all means nothing) — is an essential quality of being human. We embrace the mystery of coming from some source and returning to it. That’s the way of the world, and we just have to make our peace with it.

I don’t find that comforting! Yes, biblical realism has always owned this perception that “all go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return” (Ecclesiastes 3:20). But we long for the hope of a better future. And that’s where our second writer comes in.

Athanasius on the Source

Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop and theologian, challenged the idea of our inevitable slide into decay and non-being. His essay On the Incarnation remains profoundly influential as it probes why the eternal Son of God came to us as the fully human Jesus.

“In a stunningly brilliant plan, the Son took up a mortal body as his own.”

We know from Genesis that death is the existential consequence of our first parents’ disobedience in the garden. Once, Adam and Eve had the opportunity to choose faithfulness and so receive eternal life in these bodies in this world. But their “transgression of the commandment returned them to the natural state, so that . . . they might rightly endure in time the corruption unto non-being” (On the Incarnation, 1.4). Their “No” to God’s command condemned the world to “bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:21). We could have received everlasting life, but in the fall we became “bereft of eternal being” (On the Incarnation, 1.4). Created out of nothing, our physical being was doomed to return to nothing but dust. We are all prisoners to the irreversibility of time and its flow toward death.

Yet in his eternal love, God desired and planned to save his people (Ephesians 2:4–5). How could this be done? Athanasius considers, in human terms, the dilemma that inspired the incarnation. The Lord promised that death must follow disobedience. He could not go back on his word. He had to fulfill the wages of sin, the penalty of decay and death (Romans 6:23). But how then could he save us? The triune God himself, as spirit, could not die a human death. So, in a stunningly brilliant plan, the Son took up a mortal body as his own. Athanasius says, “For we were the purpose of his embodiment, and for our salvation, he so loved human beings as to come to be and appear in a human body” (On the Incarnation, 1.4).

How does this help us? As the Son of God through whom all things were created, Jesus stands in personal relationship to each one he has made (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16). So, as a man who is also the Son of God, what Jesus did has enormous implications for any and all who will come to him. Jesus took the full force of the promised curse of death upon himself (Galatians 3:13). He fulfilled death’s entire claim on us. God’s word stands complete: Death for all does indeed follow sin. But Jesus has taken death on behalf of all (2 Corinthians 5:14–15). We in Christ will rise again to embodied eternal life (Romans 8:11).

Athanasius jubilantly restates this good news:

The death of all was completed in the lordly body, and also death and corruption were destroyed by the Word in it. For there was need of death, and death on behalf of all had to take place, so that what was required by all might occur. . . . [The Word] took to himself a body able to die, that he might offer it as his own on behalf of all and as himself suffering for all. (On the Incarnation, 4.20)

In Christ, life does, indeed, return to a source: Those who place their trust in him will dwell with the Father forever. While the streams of this fallen world flow toward nothingness, Jesus offers living water “welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

Life Runs Away to Christ

The autumn reminds us how “seriously, sadly” time runs away, seemingly into nothingness. Death comes. But Jesus has conquered death (1 Corinthians 15:54–57). It is now only momentary, not eternal, for those joined to him.

Fall pierces. It brings a memento mori written into creation. Life runs away. But now in Christ, we know where it goes. It flows into more life by the grace of the Son of God, who joined himself to our humanity forever in order to declare, “I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death” (Revelation 1:18). This fall, as the leaves flutter down and the crisp wind stings your face — when your thoughts turn toward the endings of things — remember the one who gave his life for you. Rejoice in him. And run to him for life anew.