7,441 Days Until Glacier National Park
Where I hope and pray we'll be when the next eclipse comes to the United States
So 5/6 of my family (4 of the 5 humans and Scout) was in northern Ohio yesterday to take in the eclipse. It was the 2nd total solar eclipse I have seen in my life and, unless I want to travel to Iceland in 2026 (which I do), it will probably be the last one I see until 7,441 days from now when a late afternoon eclipse crosses from southern Canada into Montana and the western parts of North and South Dakota. (Link)
Here are a few of my favorite photos from yesterday’s eclipse:
So 7,441 days from now until the future eclipse in Glacier but there’s a lot between now and then - just thinking back to 7,441 days ago...
7,441 days ago, I was still a relative newlywed. I wasn’t yet a father. I was a few years into my first call as a pastor. My wife and I were still living in South Dakota. We had a cat and lived in a town with a stunning view of the town water tower. I wasn’t an obsessive photographer and I had never heard of the enneagram. I generally disliked (but probably simply didn’t understand) poetry. I was about to make the switch from Windows to Mac and I owned a Motorola Razr flip phone and had to carefully keep track of the minutes I used lest I go over. I weighed at least 20-30 lbs more than I do now and pretty much hated the idea of regular exercise. Jake Plummer was the new quarterback of the Broncos and Colorado was still in the Big 12 (which they are going back to next season ironically enough). The Two Towers (Lord of the Rings) was the top movie of the year and my wife and my favorite shows were Ed and The West Wing airing back to back on NBC on Wednesday nights (no streaming but we did have a an early TiVo DVR). Suffice to say, a few things have changed.
Over the last 24 hours, I’ve been pondering a bit about what the world will be 20 years from now. I want to be as optimistic as possible about it but that’s not easy with some of the things we are facing right now. I know that I will be past “official” retirement age but who knows whether social security will be around or what retirement might look like at that time. Will either of the denominations in which I have served as a pastor still be around? I do know that some of the people that I love dearly in this life will no longer be around even in the best case scenarios. Who knows if I will be? After all, I’ve done quite a few funerals for people younger than I’ll be in 2044.
I hope that by that time, we will have really dug into the work of slowing if not reversing the effects of climate change. I hope that our leaders will have seen the light of what needs to be done and that it didn’t start because a new crisis emerged but instead that we listened to the science that is already crying out to us. I hope that when I go to see that eclipse in Glacier National Park that there will still be glaciers there.
I pray that we will have moved to a better place in the ways that we are relating to one another in our country. I pray that we will have started moving beyond “othering” those we disagree with and that our elected leaders might start to once again work with one another rather than against one another.
I pray that a greater sense of human dignity and human rights exists than today and that we live out the reality that equal rights for all doesn’t mean less rights for some. I hope that there is much more listening to the stories of people so that we can understand each other far more than judging. As Ted Lasso said, hopefully there’s more curiosity and less judgment.
I pray that the church will be a vibrant, compassionate, and active presence in the world and that the name of Jesus is connected more to what we read in the book of Acts - people were drawn to the church because of the radical ways with which they loved one another - than with political movements or extremest ideologies. I pray that we will have modeled something different for the world over the last 20 years than we’ve modeled for the last 20.
I pray that the places in the world today that are so marked by horrific violence have been resolved and that ways have been found for people currently in conflict to find ways to live, if not with one another, at least alongside one another. I pray that the children of 2044 aren’t still needing to practice active-shooter drills in schools and that mass shootings are a thing of the past.
I hope that AI has not gone full-Skynet on us and that we are using this amazing technology for good and not for ill. I hope creativity continues to flourish in beautifully unique ways whether it is with a pen and paper, a brush and canvas, a keyboard and screen, or a host of other ways that people express their creative drives.
I hope that our collective future is more like those imagined in Star Trek, Back to the Future 2 (first half) and Arrival than Blade Runner, The Last of Us, or Children of Men. I hope that there are human footprints on Mars and that other telescopes are out in space seeing deeper and further into the history of the universe than we are able to do today. I hope that we have begun to understand dark matter and that clean energy is thriving across the planet.
I hope that my wife and I will nearing our 50th anniversary wherever we may be living and serving by that time. I hope that one of my children is making good trouble fighting for equal rights for all. I hope another is making incredible scientific discoveries and another is changing politics and the world for the better. But even if that’s not the course their lives take, I hope they are happy and have found purpose and meaning in their lives. And I hope that I am with all of them in Glacier National Park 7,441 days from now.
Will all of this happen? Probably not. Will some of it? I sure hope so. It is so easy to be pessimistic about the future because there are lots of things to be pessimistic about right now. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hope, pray, and work for something different. I think of the words of Jeremiah that show up in so many graduation cards at this time of the year that God has plans for our welfare and not harm and for a future and a hope. I love the benediction in Romans 15... “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
But all that I hope and pray for won’t just happen. As wonderful as it would be to just sit back and let others do the work or hope that somehow everything will begin to turn in these directions, that’s not how change takes place. If I want to see these things happen, I have to do the work and hopefully inspire others to do the same. I don’t want to get to 7,441 days from now standing in Glacier National Park and look back with regret about what I could have done over the last twenty years. I love how MaryAnn McKibben Dana puts it in Hope: A User’s Manual (which if you haven’t noticed is a book I really think y’all ought to read)
Hope is not an outcome, a product, or a projection. Hope, first and foremost, is a story we live in, a story we cultivate and perpetuate.1
A story we live in..a story we cultivate and perpetuate. Yup. As millions of people had a shared experience yesterday of looking up to see a rare celestial marvel, I pray that 7,441 days from now, we will have more to share in common than a 3 minute moment in the sky but instead that we will be honoring our shared humanity and our shared planet far more than we are doing today. And, of course, I’m already hoping for clear skies 7,441 days from now in Glacier National Park.
I’d love to hear in the comments what you hope for 7,441 days from now…
GPLJ,
Ed
McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Hope: A User's Manual (pp. 107-108). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
This is so meaningful, Ed! Both thinking about the past and imagining the future....