Standing at Six O’clock

This morning I read that people are ‘…like the new grass of the morning – though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered.’

If midlife is midday… folks speak of a midlife crisis… perhaps around the age of fifty? So at seventy-five I guess I’m at six in the evening. Perhaps I’m becoming dry and withed…

Yesterday we saw ‘Dear Evan Hanson’. Evan Hanson is a high school teenager, with social anxiety, who struggles to fit in. Anxious and under pressure he doesn’t tell the whole truth and problems escalate…

It’s a story about flawed people who want the best but fail. It tackles questions of teenage friendship, suicide, grief, guilt, truth, bad parenting, mental health…

Danish philosopher [MS1] Søren Kierkegaard is attributed with saying: ‘Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.’ Evan’s ‘untruth’ moves forward, growing into a web of lies. Events spiral out of control. At the end the truth emerges and everyone look backs and understands…

Standing at six o’clock I look back and see the weaknesses of Evan and the central characters replicated in folks I’ve known; sometimes I’ve been critical or judgemental. I’ve also seen those weaknesses in me…

Standing at six o’clock I don’t know what the future holds. I progress with incomplete information and understanding, as life moves on. Sometimes I pause, look back and seek to understand so that I can move forward with greater wisdom.

Justin Paul, one of the Evan Hansen songwriters, writes: ‘We find people rather beautiful and messy and think that that is a fairly honest take on most of us. We found interest in meeting characters in some of their brokenness and documenting how they find their way to redemption.’

Standing at six o’clock, I have no option but to live today forwards. My prayer is that I will see the beauty, mess and brokenness in myself and those around me… that in discovering wisdom and truth we shall find our way to redemption.