Wired for Life

“It’s like sitting by a dying person in the hospital, knowing you can’t do anything about it.”  This was the evaluation offered a couple of days ago in one of the starker moments of facing the reality that the university where my husband is a faculty member will close at the end of the school year. 

I’ve been keeping my finger on the pulse of status reports on Facebook from members of the campus community.  There is still a fierce reliance on God being expressed, but a sighing sorrow at the loss also beats steadily.  To be honest, people are grieving.  Some are grieving more than others–one faculty wife had just returned from burying her mother in a distant state when the news of the campus closing hit.  Another staff member is watching two beloveds die–his life work and his earthly lifegiver…his mom.  Heavy loads.

As I drove home from the morning school and work run for my guys, I observed true November all around me.  For the past twenty-four hours we’ve had the gray, rainy conditions that scream “November! Take that–and that!” and which, in a mocking voice, proclaim the end of the seasons of growth and the bounty of harvest.   The leaves are pretty much off the trees, lying sodden where they fluttered and scuttered before the weightiness of the precipitation rendered them motionless.  The mellowness of last week’s Indian summer has been struck a death blow. 

Life in this November could bring one to a screeching halt of emotions and thinking about the future.  It would not be that hard to stop dreaming, stop pursuing, stop seeking beauty, and just stay stuck in gray.  Except…

What is it that propels us beyond?  What keeps us from just curling up in a corner somewhere, yielding without struggle to a void that sucks us in?  That may be a little dramatic, but the realist in me says it wouldn’t be that hard, but for this one thing:  We are wired for life, not death. 

From the beginning it has been so.  Before the first duo of the world chose their own way over God’s Eden, Plan A was for their eternal life.  It was only because they chose to give in to the lesser, the place that was not bathed in full light, that they fell from the original delightful intention for their lives. 

Why else do we do everything in our power to save a life?  Why else would we humans, against all odds, take risks for the sake of ”new and improved” in all areas of life?  Why are we always reaching for the thing that makes us feel good, that puts us in the sunshine place?  We tend in the direction of depravity in these pursuits when left to our own devices–precisely because we are fallen people in a fallen world.  But the thing that we often overlook is, until we have succumbed to darkness and death, we are driven to grasp light and life, even if only by our fingernails.

It just struck me this morning why loss, sorrow, even ”rainy days and Mondays” get us down, strike such blows at our minds and emotions.  It is because we were made to live.

The choice, then,  speaking bottom line, isn’t really about the next job or even about how we will do loss when that loved one is gently removed from our physical presence, though, yes, we must deal with those.  It is about how we will embrace life, that for which we were made.  There is only that one Way to embrace true Life.  In His light we see light, and the losses, small or weighty, which bring us sorrow and death, are transformed.  They are no less painful–Is there a scale for measuring the pain of the thorn-torn flesh or the sting of salty tears on the fresh heart wound?–but they are borne in tandem.  The Lifegiver comes alongside and lifts our heads.  In His light, we see light.  He says, “Come, and I will give you rest.”  It’s all about life.