Of breath?
Saturday, April 22, 2023
All Things Die, Even Us. That Is Not The End?
Psalms 39:5
You have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight. Surely everyone stands as a mere breath. Selah
2 Corinthians 5:1
For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
Words of Grace For Today
The ‘fountain of youth’ is a the blatant example of how we strive to reach beyond our own limits. Life is short and we would like to live forever, or at least longer, much longer, with good health.
No one really wants to live on in an increasingly vegetable state for decades and centuries longer than one would otherwise have lived.
So we strive to maintain our health as long as possible, and wish that we could find ‘the key’ or ‘the keys’ to give us better health: a pill, a surgery, a diet, an exercise, a meditation ….
The gift God gives us is a life, in today’s terms in Canada, which can last at most just over a century, and for most of us about 8 decades. (79.49 years for men and 83.9 years for women (so https://www.cpp.ca/blog/what-is-the-life-expectancy-in-canada/).
As if the gift of life were not enough, we yearn for more, and some of us do more than yearn. Some of us go to great extremes to have more life and more from life for ourselves at cost to others, even as far as taking the goodness of life from others, even taking life itself from others (as in killing for organs to transplant) in order to lengthen our own lives.
Yet God gives life as we receive it: blessed.
Normal for us is to fear the loss of life, not only the end termination in death, but the loss of abilities while we live on and on and on. Perhaps the worst example is Alzheimer’s from which one fades in and out of remembering even one’s own identity, while, in one’s more lucid moments, fully knowing the loss of memory will return.
The healthy, God-given response to that very legitimate fear, is to accept death in all its forms and trust that God planned for that, too. God planned for that by promising us that we will live on even after death, and not in the imperfect-dying manner in which we live now, rather in the perfect way that God makes possible at our creation (well limited by our sinfulness – greatly limited): eternal, perfectly healthy, and gracious: living in peace, with joy, and loving one another as God loves us.
Life remains short for us all (though longer than almost all of our ancestors). Life is nonetheless blessed!
Certainly, specifically because it is short we have the opportunity of recognizing that life is blessed.
So how do we choose to live this day:
Will we continually complain that life is short and that we slowly lose our health with age, all the while striving to live longer and better?
Or
Will we live out the blessings that God pours so freely on us, and share them with others?