A few weeks ago I was gardening in my backyard when a car slowly pulled up and stopped in the alley. A man got out and said, “Hey, I used to live here!” We struck up a long conversation about the history of the house that my wife and I have lived in for nineteen years now, and which he spent most of his childhood in decades ago. He asked about the quirks and the secret hiding spots that he remembered as a boy. We asked about the renovations and how certain rooms were used before us. Although we couldn’t let him inside to look around (we had some sick kids that day), he asked to walk into the garage, which apparently hadn’t changed much since he last saw it. He broke down sobbing the instant he walked in. Even though I had added a number of shelves and updates over the years, the smells hadn’t changed. The old wood evoked memories of playing in the rafters with his brothers, and the emotions came in like a flood. Now, with strands of gray hair lacing his head, he was confronted with the unchanging nature of his childhood home, and it all made for a moment too powerful for words.

After he left, my wife and I couldn’t help but realize that soon enough that’ll be us, that someday we’ll come back and have the same conversation with younger owners, tearing up at the memories of raising a family there.

Change is an interesting thing. It can be both good and bad. And I’m often struck by how uncomfortable yet unavoidable it is — almost like death, though not as dark, and with less fear attached to it. It’s maybe why we talk so much about the good old days, yet simultaneously find ourselves unable or unwilling to see the inevitability of drifting away from them. Sometimes the only outlet, then, is longing and sadness, but also some healthy self-awareness that dips its toe into the theological.

If change seems inevitable for us, the opposite is the case for God, who is (to use a fancy theological word) immutable, unchangeable. And not only God but also the gospel itself – an unshakable promise that never changes or weakens. Time moves on, but we’re called more to remembrance than innovation. And yet, without even trying, we often “age” past the wooden rafters of the gospel and try to add to what’s been given. It’s ingrained in all of us. I was recently talking with some friends who were lamenting how they made the Christian life too complicated, and how their story was one of spiritual recovery back to simple, grace-based Christianity. I could relate.

I wonder if Jesus’ call to childlike faith in the Gospels isn’t simply a call to weakness and dependence (though it is), but also a call to simplicity. We get older in the faith, and often with age comes the trap of thinking we know better than we used to. Going deeper into the love of God, as Paul prays for the Ephesians, is one thing, but qualifying or going past the love of God is another, and altogether dangerous. Love is the final frontier, you could say. It never ends. It always perseveres. There’s no uncharted theological land outside of it that needs to be explored. Grace is always the last word, so the way forward is down, beneath our feet. We’ve only begun to understand how rich, unending, and surprising God’s love is for us in Christ. But so much of our understanding of what growth and progress are has to do with novelty, and so it goes on and on, the cycle of thinking there’s more out there for us than what God called his final and fixed word of love in Hebrews 1.

I find solace in the fact that scripture’s “heroes” struggle with this — like Peter, whose unwillingness to dine with dirty gentiles brought into question how much he really believed God’s grace was enough. So, I cling to the anchor that Jesus died not just for my big bad sins, but my “faith sins” as well, those sins that operate from the shadows and seek to add to the grace that I know deep down is sufficient — “If I just ascended a little bit more, I think I could prove that I was worth saving.” But that way of living ages me swiftly and leads me not only to forget the beauty of the gospel but also to change it into something it’s not, into some awful hybrid of law and grace, which, Paul says in Romans, then ceases to become grace (Rom 11:6).

But God doesn’t age. And he’s more comfortable with repetition than we are. G. K. Chesterton once wrote:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy: for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Maybe, somewhere deep down, whether we realize it or not, the reason we’re overcome with emotion when walking into the old garages of our past is because the gospel is in there somewhere. We change and fluctuate in our sin, streaks of gray hair growing in over our ears. We wander. We forget. Many times our worst days are toward the end of our life rather than the beginning, even though others tell us that shouldn’t be the case. But then we smell the old wooden cross, and we remember that though our bodies break down, God’s love remains unchanged, and it’s ok to be a child in the faith. Grace really is free, though paid for at the highest of costs by Jesus. These things tend to elicit more and more tears with age — tears of joy and thankfulness, mixed with hope for a future when God will restore all things and bring our longings for permanence and eternal life to fruition.