6000 Days

6000 days. 5970 days to be precise, but 6000 days sounds more literary.

That is the amount of time it has taken me from when I left the University of Manitoba in April 2010 to coming back in September 2026. Sixteen and a half years. I have been ruminating on this number for some time.

What lesson have I taken from waiting 6000 days? What have I learned having lived a whole lifetime between starting the process of getting what I wanted and entering the last step of completing that process?

It is a substantial amount of time. A gulf of time between being a man in his late twenties and becoming a man in his mid-forties.

I'll tell you one thing that I have gained from these contemplations: an absolutely airtight defense when I tell my kids to be patient.

My son went fishing with his grandparents and was upset that he didn't catch a fish. I gave him the 6000 days speech.

He looked at me and almost immediately stopped feeling sorry for himself for not catching a fish.

I have observed waiting intimately in my wife, my kids, my friends, and myself. Waiting is tough. As people, we can handle the past. We accept the present. But an uncertain future is a real challenge.

I think about the sense of disappointment I had when I realized that I would not be able to enter teaching college.

My wife had a party for me at the end of my time at university in 2010. I felt like a fraud, sitting amongst people who were congratulating me for incomplete work. I needed to get a Bachelor of Arts before I could get the Bachelor of Education. I wasn't going to get the Bachelor of Education.

I spent years feeling like a failure.

I wanted something. I went for it. And I failed.

I wasn't unhappy with my life during those sixteen years. I had plenty to keep me busy. And the thing that will outlast me in this life, my children, are the only thing that really matters. Still, dealing with uncertainty has never been something I have been good at.

Perhaps that is why I have been thinking so much about these 6000 days.

Because uncertainty doesn't disappear simply because you finally arrive at the thing you have been waiting for.

I have entered the program I chased so many years ago, but this guarantees me nothing.

I am still at the mercy of teachers, administrators and fellow students who can trip me up. My life has a litany of other things that can cause me to stumble. While I have fulfilled the desire I had in 2010, I am no more certain about the events at the end of this process than I was about the events at the beginning.

So what do I do with that?

Humility and patience, I expect.

But there is something else I want to learn. Something I want to model for my kids.

Faithfulness to the future.

Not because I know tomorrow will be kinder.

Not because I know everything will work out.

Not because I have some secret knowledge that the thing I want will eventually be given to me.

Faithfulness to the future means continuing to do the work in front of me even when I cannot see what the work will produce.

And I can do that because, unlike the 29-year-old version of myself, I have a large and fairly firm structure behind me.

I have resilient kids who can survive independently. I have a partner who loves me and is willing to sacrifice alongside me. I have resources that I didn't have when I was 29, which makes the prospect of financial challenges significantly less daunting.

I can handle this.

The uncertainty is the worst part of it.

I can marshal resources, personal or otherwise, to solve a problem. Give me a problem with edges and boundaries and I will start pulling on threads until I figure something out.

But solving problems that are still unformed?

That is where anxiety lives.

And this is where I sometimes forget to factor in my God.

God is, for me, an all-sustaining piece of information. More than information, really. God provides the thing I need most: purpose.

I see purpose in my life.

I see purpose in waiting.

It doesn't feel good, and it hasn't been easy, but I see purpose.

I am not wise enough, in my own power, to look at the events of my life and declare with certainty why they happened. I don't think wisdom means pretending that I can see the whole picture.

But I have begun to see something that looks like purpose when I look backward.

I can see purpose in a retail job.

I can see purpose in friendships that led to other friendships.

I can see purpose in the strange and winding path that brought me from that party in 2010 to the university I am about to enter again in 2026.

I can see loose threads being tied together.

Maybe that is one of the gifts of time. Not that time explains everything, but that sometimes it gives you enough distance to see connections that were invisible when you were living them.

Over the last sixteen years, I confess, I have lost faith at times.

And when I lose my faith, I lose my sense of purpose.

That may be the hardest lesson of the 6000 days.

The waiting wasn't empty.

I just couldn't always see what was happening inside it.