The Best This Life Has to Give

“ . . .this life is but the childhood of our immortality.” 

August 27, 2024
Beloved: 
          The quote isn’t from a Christian devotional but a novel about CIA activity in Vietnam, as the main character, an undercover operative, reflects on his mother’s recent death.  He is not a Christian, but she was.  Fervently so, to his embarrassment until she died, when he finds himself hoping all she believed turned out to be true, if for her sake only.  Nine words.  Nine words, all of which I use regularly and have never once strung together in this particular order, an order which slayed me outright when I saw it on the page.  We call it fiction and yet, there it is:  profound spiritual truth tucked inside a novel about the CIA in Vietnam in 1968.  He’s thirty years old.  His daddy was killed at Pearl Harbor.  His uncle is a war hero and his mentor.  Disillusion and disappointment in his country and in humanity are hurtling toward him and he doesn’t even know it.
          This life is but the childhood of our immortality will most certainly find its way into my funeral liturgies from now on.  The collapse of years between a short life and a long one in the span of immortality.  Each life is a full one, no matter how much time it occupied nor the sum of breaths it drew.  Which is to say, the very best this life has to give is knowledge of itself – that we are alive, have been and always will be.  This existence is but a glimpse.  Nothing is ordinary, or maybe what seems most ordinary is positively loaded with the universe itself, the stuff of immortality.  A bird on a branch.  A cat on a step.  A toddler coloring.  All of it positively exploding with life.  Glory barely concealed in the most daily business of human activity.
          Stay indoors if you can today, friends, and be glad you don’t live in Las Vegas, where the temp is predicted to be 104.  We’ll only get to 95.  I pray the day is kind to you all.

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

Note: 
* Pastor Annette is away from work most Saturdays and all Mondays.  Apart from emergencies, calls and messages received these days will be returned and answered on Tuesdays.  Thanks!
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          *The novel is Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, one of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, an article published this summer in the New York Times.  My son-in-law and I set a goal to read them all, since between us we’ve read thirty which feels like a pretty good head start.  Naturally, the list doesn’t include books we think it should, but the NYT failed to ask us for our suggestions.