Life is fragile. Perhaps I’m thinking more about the delicacy, the whisper-thread of spider silk that our life rests upon, because last night I wrote a letter to my daughter. She’s almost one year old, and I’m just now writing to her a letter of the things I want her to know in case I’m not given the privilege of raising her.
Mostly the letter just says I love you, in about ten different ways that have nothing new or fresh about them but would be meaningful, I think and hope. I wrote this same kind of letter to my little son when he was much younger. Only a sprinkling of days had touched his reddening, downy skin outside the protection of my womb. I’d had a scare that prompted the letter. An emergency room visit that ended with me quietly going home to my middle class life and my kind husband because I live in a First World country with good hospitals. (And because God chose to keep me safe and cared for.) In a different place, it could have ended differently.
Something like that happens, and you realize that the sustaining Word that gives you breath could sustain you right into the next world. That happened just a day ago, in Beirut, with an explosion we haven’t seen the likes of except in atomic tests for years and years. It has happened in this country recently with brown and white and blue alike.
The sense of life’s fragility should not turn us bitter or angry. Instead, we should treasure the moments we are given. I might raise my daughter and see her children’s children through cloudy or fading eyes. (I remember inadvertently insulting my mother by asking her if eyes faded as you got older while staring into her big brown eyes. Now I’m almost the same age she was then.) Or this moment might be my last. I might be typing these words while my babies nap and stop breathing. So I stop and look at the monitor again and admire the soft little fluffs of hair on my baby’s skull as she sleeps hunched over her favorite blanket. I chuckle at the wiggles under my little son’s coverlet with its rows of trucks marching in a squiggly line over his wiry frame.
May we pause and give thanks for this day and this breath. The next world is better, we know, without the turmoil and treachery and grief. Yet God has granted us so much beauty within every mundane moment of this present world. His mercy is more, as one of my favorite songs says.
“His Mercy is More,” written by Matt Papa:
What love could remember no wrongs we have done
Omniscient, all knowing, He counts not their sum
Thrown into a sea without bottom or shore
Our sins they are many, His mercy is more
Chorus
Praise the Lord, His mercy is more
Stronger than darkness, new every morn
Our sins they are many, His mercy is more
What patience would wait as we constantly roam
What Father, so tender, is calling us home
He welcomes the weakest, the vilest, the poor
Our sins they are many, His mercy is more
What riches of kindness He lavished on us
His blood was the payment, His life was the cost
We stood ‘neath a debt we could never afford
Our sins they are many, His mercy is more