A dear friend’s wife struggled with multiple sclerosis for over forty years. Then, during emergency surgery, she suffered a heart attack. When that same surgery revealed extensive cancer, they knew the end was near.
To read my friend’s email about that grueling trial is to stand at the edge of a deep, wide, and humbling canyon. Yet, he summed it up so simply:
“Life has to be lived in all the ways it might come to us.”
Those simple words could only roll out of humility, brokenness, and grace. They describe the attitude that has marked most people’s lives throughout history. That posture is not passive or evasive; it describes a life that leans into the wind.
From my childhood, I’ve watched farmers, ranchers, and others who worked within harsh environments cope with weather, disease, and market turbulence.
And accidents.
By the time many farmers recline in satin caskets, the passing mourners well understand the scars, missing fingers, and empty sleeves.
Not coincidentally, I also grew up in a sense of God. I’ve seen the religious matrix of farming communities mold people into a vertical posture. Dawn to dusk, they studied that vast canopy of sky, knowing it could bring every form and extreme of sun, moisture, temperature, and wind. Most bowed to whatever it brought. Maybe that’s why so many farm faces reveal such rugged splendor.
Recent decades have increased the possibilities for a self-designed life. “I’ll take a little of that... maybe just a pinch more. No, none of that.” Control, convenience, and comfort have become our culture’s new virtues.
Now, as we cross the threshold of a new year, including a new political season, we—as people always do—face the brisk winds of change.
For example, think about life in its pristine beginning. Pregnancy pulls a raw and tumultuous life into being; a tiny hurricane careens around the womb, wrecking all shreds of comfort, convenience, and control. The baby also brings pain, nausea, and—for the next quarter century—great expense. Babies change the course and terrain of life.
However, it seems that embracing life in all the ways it might come often weaves us into a larger tapestry, a more magnificent story, one we could not have created or discovered. Yet we so often feel the need for our own fingerprints across our own life. Maybe it’s our fear of mortality. We associate death with the loss of our being, not with the birth of newness. As Richard Bach wrote,
The caterpillar believes it is dying because it's being sealed in a tomb. The Master knows that the caterpillar is not dying ... things are never over, that change is carrying us, (so often kicking and screaming), to higher states of being ... What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.
When you meet life in all the ways it may come to you, remember the prayer of former UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold:
“For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.”
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