A student recently asked me in well-chosen words, “What will it all be like when, if I may put it that way, you are no longer there?” He was quite right to remind me of this possibility. “Fast falls the eventide” is only too true of me. The shadows of our day are growing longer … But because they are cast by the light which shines before us, we cannot and must not look back on them, but must look forward to the great light before us.

(In Busch, Karl Barth, 407).