Choose Life!

 December 28, 2020

My evening musings began on this date eight years ago. I had allowed my contentment to slip between my fingers, receding before the onslaught of incessant election coverage until God brought me up short, asking, “Jim, where is your joy?” When I couldn’t answer, he gave me a way out of the darkness into which I had unwittingly descended. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had been consistently neglectful of a simple Christian command: “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” (1 Thessalonians 5:18). That disobedience was poisoning my heart, darkening my soul.

I began writing down the things for which I was thankful, totaling up over a thousand gifts of grace, both great and small before the year had come to an end. In the intervening years, my thoughts have ranged from gifts of gratitude to musings on the Apostles’ Creed, various Scriptural texts and personal experiences. 

Tonight, I am thankful for the gift of life itself. Life is such an amazing and precious mystery, even in the midst of difficulties and trials of which there has been no shortage this year. We’ve welcomed new life into this world, and bid tearful farewell to old life slipping quietly away. In the one, the joining together of man and woman produces something that wasn’t there before, mimicking the work of the Creator. In the other, that which was suddenly is no more, the body that lived and breathed stilled, exhaling in its last breath the spirit that returns to God. In between, we love and hate, build and destroy, give and receive, curse and praise. If we open to it, grace lights upon us, sometimes gently, other times in fierce assault upon a resistant heart and a dull mind. Always, life comes as a gift we can either open and give thanks, or leave wrapped and unused as we trudge through this world in hopeless despair. Moses had it right: “I set before you this day life and death...Choose life!”