Celebrating the Gift of Life
August 4, 2008
By Jennifer McClure
Within the past couple of months,
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 bond
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 25:14-30 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, whom 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 in 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.
— Jennifer McClure is
assistant editor of Today’s Pentecostal
Evangel and blogs at Going Up? (jmcclure.agblogger.org).
