I still remember what I ordered in the pub on Sunday afternoon a few kilometers from campus when he told me who he voted for. I’d known him for years and never pegged him for it. Never assumed that we would vote for the same party when he was so different from me. 

But we shared Yorkshire pudding and sat together for hours, talking about literature and all the books we don’t have in common. 

Goes to show people are people–not their political affiliations. 

And I remember when she showed up at my door after he died and sat on the front porch with me. Or when she sent me that care package right after my first breakup. And we don’t see eye to eye on some major headlines. 

But I’d die for them. Or sit on the kitchen floor with them. Or on their couch in their living room after their baby goes to heaven. 

I scroll through stories of people calling other people “idiots”. And then I turn off my phone for a few hours. I don’t answer calls. 

Because pride divides. Alienates. Dehumanizes. 

But there’s one weekend in August when we laugh and hike and jump off cliffs and she never mentions it at all–the one thing that everyone has been talking about all year. Not once. 

It doesn’t register until later that it’s the first weekend where the biggest issue of the year was not an issue for us. “It’s none of my business,” she tells me later. 

Sometimes I scroll through the comment section of the New York Times. It has become the business of everyone to care about everyone else’s business. 

And there are reasons to care and to be informed. 

And there are reasons to go hiking on a Sunday morning–far away from cell service. “The reason I love hiking is because everyone can’t look at their phones for hours,” I tell him. 

And as we climb the snow-covered trail under the warm sun, I wonder if heaven has wilderness. I wonder if we wander for days in wild places with our Lord. And I wonder if it’s something like this day when time doesn’t matter.

Because time doesn’t matter to Him. He is in the future and in the past. He is where people are deciding to vote for someone who won’t be born for years and He is at the end of our time.

And He is here with me as I pray about how to live.

He is: I AM. 

“I want all this to be over,” I tell her. But I know it will not be over for me for a long time. 

But it is for Him. 

It is seen, lived, completed for Him. From the Messiah on the cross to the King of Kings on the white horse, it is finished. 

And it’s our business to live like it. 

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Revelation 1:8