The Passage of Time

Today I brought two yearbooks with me to class: both the 1978 and 1979 editions of The Biolan. I found them amongst my mom’s things and discovered that she actually attended Biola around the same time that my professor and classmate’s mom did.

Everyone seemed to really enjoy seeing what our professor looked like when he was a freshman and sophomore. They especially got a kick out of his blond hair and the beard he sported as a first year student. He said (jokingly) that he was humiliated, but I think secretly he liked seeing those old pictures as much as we did.

After Ariel and I made our usual stop by his office to chat, we headed over the café to have dinner. We got to talking about our different professors, musing about what they must have been like as young people. It’s really difficult to think of them as anyone other than who they are now.

We contemplated what it was like for our male professors (we only really have one female prof) to court their future wives, and tried to imagine how they proposed. Were they romantic, practical, comical, serious, awkward?

It strikes me as strange how little we know of our professors’ personalities. To a certain extent, we can pick up on mannerisms, or style of teaching. We know how they dress, or the way they use their hands when they talk. We know how to joke around with them, or what will make them feel uncomfortable—we take great delight in using that to our advantage.

But at the same time, there’s so much we don’t know. How do they interact with their spouse or kids? What are they like when they're relaxed and informal? How do they like spend their free time? What were they like as college students? Are they ever silly? Do they ever laugh so hard they can’t breathe?

At Biola, and particularly in the English department, we tend to be pretty close with our professors. We treat them as mentors; we know they care deeply about us on many different levels. But the nature of our relationship with them as students naturally puts some amount of distance between us.

I guess it was just interesting to think about our professor: what he must have been like when he attended Biola and what he’s like now. At our age, we can hardly imagine what God is going to do with our lives—where He’s going to take us, how He wants to use us, how we will move and grow and change.

Seeing those old yearbooks was like seeing the passing of time. It had a really odd effect on me. It’s good to look back at where you’ve come from, and it’s good to look forward to what you will become. But it definitely makes the here and now seem almost surreal.