Time doesn’t always move the way we think it does. Sometimes it drifts, quiet and unnoticed, until one day you realize years have slipped by while you were busy living small, ordinary moments.

I was out walking the other night, taking my usual loop around the neighborhood, when a couple came toward me pushing a stroller. Not the upright kind with snack trays and dangling toys, but the kind that holds a car seat, clicked into place so the baby faces the parent. The baby was fast asleep, completely unaware of the world rolling past.

I smiled, and they smiled back. I passed them with the kind of glance you give when you recognize the chapter someone’s in because you’ve lived it too.

Because I used to be them.

Not in some sentimental, metaphorical way. Actually. Literally.

I walked this same loop with a stroller. I walked it with babies who spit out pacifiers and pulled off their tiny socks like offerings to the pavement, who giggled at passing dogs and flailed their little arms at birds in flight. I walked it with toddlers who had more questions than the world had answers. I walked it in flip flops, in boots, in the kind of weather that turns your breath into fog.

And now, next Friday, I’ll pack up my youngest child, no longer small and no longer sleeping in a stroller, and drive her across the state to move her into her university dorm room.

It catches in my chest, how quickly it all passed. As if those years were just one quiet loop around the neighborhood.

Of course, they weren’t. They were school projects, gluten-free birthday cakes, and slime-making marathons. They were camping trips, piano lessons and soccer games, cross country meets and quick stops at Big Foot Java for energy drinks. They were laughter (and sometimes arguments) so loud it rattled the walls, and quiet dinners when no one quite knew what to say. They were a thousand Wednesdays and Thursdays that added up to something holy.

I think we imagine life will be made of grand events, but it rarely is. Most of it is made in small portions. Like manna. Just enough for today. No leftovers, no storing it up for tomorrow. Just this moment, this mile, this meal. Forever is composed of nows, as Dickinson put it. And I think she was right.

And while it’s true that I wish it hadn’t gone by so quickly, I also know I wouldn’t trade any of it. Even the hard parts, even the quiet frustrations and missteps. Because all of it was threaded with grace.

There’s a verse I’ve always loved, tucked away in Ecclesiastes: “God has made everything beautiful in its time.” That word in matters. Not after its time, or looking back on its time, but in it. Which means there was beauty right there in the middle of the mess and motion, even when I couldn’t see it yet.

I see it now.

So no, I didn’t miss it. Not all of it. I held many of those moments close in my heart. I whispered thanks under my breath more often than anyone knew. I tried to walk slowly through the middle, not just race toward the finish line.

And here I am again, walking. But now the scenery looks different. The stroller has been traded for six extra large zippered moving bags. The baby has grown into a college student with ideas and dreams and an Amazon wish list.

Still, I believe there are more moments to come. A new season full of firsts. Of new kinds of walks and talks and quiet miracles. Maybe even a few that will take place around this same neighborhood loop.

The road to Emmaus comes to mind. That quiet walk where Jesus showed up beside two weary travelers, unrecognized, until their eyes were opened. I think about that sometimes. How He walks with us, unnoticed, through the ordinary. Through neighborhoods and nightfall, through coming and going, through strollers and zippered moving bags alike.

Maybe that’s what I’m learning. Or maybe it’s what I keep learning as I get older. That the sacred is almost always hidden in the slow, unnoticed steps. That the miracle is in the middle.

So I’ll keep walking. One loop at a time.