Lessons in Living

It's been one of those weeks. Taxes were due, bills mounted. Seemed like every time I turned around I had to get something else done. And my wife is gone for the week, which typically leaves me in a little more of an unstable emotional state than usual.

And I ran into reminders. I cleaned off the mail on one of the cabinets, and in doing so came across an old announcement from my sister-in-law. It was the graduation announcement for my niece, Jessica. Something moved in my heart, a flutter of pain, the first step towards tears.

I kept cleaning and came across another document mentioning Jessica; her funeral bulletin. Just over 6 months ago Jessica, at a way-too-young age of 22, lost her battle with leukemia but won the victory. That flutter of pain became a stab of grief, opening a wound I tried hard to keep bandaged, and I cried hard tears. Just can't make sense of it, just can't figure out why God didn't just swoop down and heal her.

I'm reading a book called When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in The Box by John Ortberg, In one chapter he tells the story about his uncle Dale who fell off a roof and ended up in a coma. Amazingly, he came out of the coma and returned home to his family. Yet those events helped Ortberg, and us, to understand that...

"One thing is much clearer to everyone; that life is a gift, that every day is an unpurchased miracle, every second is overtime. I do not know why life works the way it does. I do not know why some people recover and others die. I do not know why some prayers get answered and some (seem to) go unheeded. But I do know that life is a gift. I know that it is not something we earn, create, control, or sustain. I know that one truth about us is that we forget that we are going to die. The other truth is that we forget we are alive."

Remember this day that you are alive, that God loves you and there's nothing you can do, nothing better, nothing worse, that can change that fact.

Live life.
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