I remember the first time that celebrating Seollal, the Korean Lunar New Year, felt strange to me as a child. That morning, after I ate tteokguk, a soup made with thinly sliced rice cakes, at the family table, the adults around me smiled and said I was now a year older.
But it was not my birthday. There was no cake, no candles, no sense of having earned anything. Yet something had changed.
On February 17 this year, more than 50 million people in South Korea will grow a year older all at once. The logic is not as strange as it sounds: South Koreans traditionally count age not only by individual birthdays but also with the arrival of the first day of the Lunar New Year.
Seollal’s way of marking time finds a parallel in Psalm 103. The psalm neither interrupts time’s movement nor treats it as a problem to solve. Instead, the psalm depicts how time meets people who are already living inside a God-given mercy that has carried them this far.
Many of us begin a new year by seeking to make the most of our time. In this framework, time becomes something to manage well or risk wasting. We look for goals to set, habits to form, or problems to fix.
Yet days slip by as we measure them in unfinished to-do lists. When plans fall short, the feeling that follows this realization is often less like motivation and more like guilt.
We also struggle with time because it rarely stays abstract. Signs of aging appear in ordinary places: faint lines around the eyes or gray hairs that no longer feel temporary.
“Seeing time as a scarce resource makes us desperate; minutes and hours slip through our fingers,” CT editor Isabel Ong writes in a review of the TV show 3 Body Problem. “Even the best moments of love and connection are fleeting.”
Psalm 103 also describes our lives as brief and fragile: “The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field;the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more” (vv. 15–16).
The psalm acknowledges what Seollal assumes, that time moves forward whether or not we are ready. Days accumulate. Years pass without waiting for us to catch our breath. Yet the psalm treats time not as an obstacle to overcome but as the environment within which finite lives unfold. Grass grows where it is planted. Flowers bloom according to their season. Neither is asked to last longer than it can.
Eating tteokgukas a symbol of turning one year older during Seollal reflects Psalm 103’s understanding of time as a precious gift we ought to receive in gratefulness to God, rather than a condition with which we wrangle out of fear or despair.
This simple bowl of soup does not mark a personal achievement or a completed milestone. It marks arrival: You have made it into another year, as everyone else at the table has.
Eating this soup does not cause time to pass; it acknowledges that it already has. This is why Koreans have traditionally joked about measuring age in bowls of soup. Each bowl represents a year crossed, not earned. Age accumulates not through individual progress but through a simple, shared ritual. You eat, and the year counts you in.
This perspective of time and aging disrupts our modern-day penchant for control over the length of our days on earth. In Psalm 103, we recognize that God does not evaluate lives in terms of output or accomplishment. Rather, God sets human brevity alongside divine endurance.
Psalm 103 declares, “But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children—with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts” (v. 17–18).
Here, one generation makes room for the next. What lasts is not speed, effort, or careful planning but God’s steadfast love that moves from generation to generation. Human lives remain short, but they are held within a faithfulness that endures beyond any single lifespan.
Scripture returns elsewhere to this pattern of recognizing time as God given and God ordained. Genealogies move forward without commentary. Scripture offers no explanation, no evaluation, no pause to interpret their meaning. Name follows name, generation gives way to generation, and the list continues. Lives are recorded not for their achievements but for their place within a larger, ongoing story.
Biblical festivals operate similarly. The Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths return each year by God’s command, not human consensus, and gather people into remembering God’s faithfulness whether or not they feel ready.
Like genealogies, these festivals assume continuity. They locate individual lives within rhythms that precede them and will continue after them. They show how meaning often emerges not through explanation but through faithful return.
Seollal is also marked by family rituals observed by many Korean households, including Christians. Younger family members bow to elders in sebae as a sign of respect, and elders give sebaetdon, or New Year’s money, typically placed in small envelopes and accompanied by brief words of blessing.
Like the biblical festivals, these practices repeat each year at Seollal with little explanation. They are meant not to motivate personal improvement but to remind people that they belong to a familial story that did not begin with them and will not end with them.
Wisdom literature presses this understanding of time further. Proverbs 16:31 calls gray hair a crown, not because age guarantees virtue but because it bears witness to endurance. This proverb does not romanticize aging. It recognizes that our lifespans, with all their physical and physiological constraints, testify that God sustains all our lives year after year.
Seollal teaches Korean Christians to mark the passage of time as this proverb does. Aging is not an individual achievement but something that occurs communally. The year turns, and nothing about your life is neatly summarized or resolved. You sit at the same table with people who have known you longer than you have known yourself. These people remember versions of you that never make it into your own account of who you are now.
Year after year, parents, aunts, and older relatives use the same titles for me: daughter, niece, the youngest. While the years pass, the way they refer to me does not change. There is a comforting familiarity in these conversations, in how we relate to one another in ways that withstand the test of time.
By beginning with togetherness, Seollal also gives tangible form to this biblical vision of God sustaining life. The festival unfolds over several days, often three, during which schools, offices, and businesses close, making room for families to gather and return home.
In this way, we don’t experience time alone. Years gather meaning as we live them alongside others and as we remember and name each other within our shared lives.
Time does not single out anyone at Seollal. It brings people back to the same table, making visible what is usually easy to forget: that everyone has been carried forward into a new year together.
Psalm 103 gives language to this moment when it says God remembers we are dust (v. 14). The psalm recognizes human life as finite and formed, explaining why mercy frames God’s response to us: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him” (v. 13).
This year, when I eattteokguk again, I will not feel older in any dramatic sense. What I will feel instead is a solid, secure sense of place. God has given me another year, and he has carried me into it with my family (and millions of other South Koreans).
Psalm 103:14–18 helps me to name my experience of Seollal by offering a different account of time. Time is not an achievement measured by progress or productivity. It is a shared gift we receive within the ordering faithfulness of God, who holds human life within time with full knowledge of its limitations.
Time is not a test imposed upon human life but the medium in which life unfolds under a prior divine recognition of finitude. Within this framework, our brief, frail lives are not conceived as self-contained units competing against the clock. As Psalm 103 shows, God draws us together and carries our lives forward in time. That is something we can celebrate and rejoice in as the people of God.
Bohye Kim is a postdoctoral research associate at the H. Milton Haggard Center for New Testament Textual Studies.
