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Celebrating the Gift of Life
By Jennifer McClure | June 20, 2008
Within the last three weeks, I’ve known a baby to be born, a niece to graduate from high school, family members to add a year to their age, and a beloved former high school English teacher to pass away after a hard battle with cancer. Thanks to the common bound of Christianity, though, even the funeral was a celebration of life — of the one she lived and the one she is now experiencing.
As Ecclesiastes 3 reminds us, there is a time for every season of life. [And of course it’s hard not to think of the song “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To everything there is a season).”] These events also remind me of how precious life is and how much potential one life holds.
For some reason I was thinking of my niece the other day and her heading off to college this fall and wondering what she’ll end up doing with her life when it really clicked with me that this life truly is a gift. My existence is a gift, and just as the talents given in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25 were to be invested and used wisely, so is my life. What will I do with my gift? When I reflect on my time here at the end of my days, what do I hope to see? As my story unfolds, who will my life impact and in what ways will it impact them?
Will we take our lives into our own hands or seek out the Father’s wisdom and guidance and give the gift He’s given us back to Him to protect, make strong and use?
It brings to my mind a father giving a child a gift that needs assembly and is beyond the child’s years of understanding how to assemble or even properly use the assembled gift. If the child were to refuse to let the father build it and instead try to assemble it on his own, months later the gift will probably still be little pieces scattered about the house or at best somewhat put together but not at all in such a way so that it can be used for its original purpose.
The gift of life — for some reason it’s just taken on a deeper meaning for me.
Topics: Devotional, Goals, Random Ramblings |
June 20th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
i definitely like that analogy about the little child and the toy….having a little brother who got his share of “some assembly required” toys over the years, it is so true at how important the directions (a.k.a. the “master plans”) are…because my brother always refused to read the directions, everything but the intended toy takes shape!