Cling Loosely

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

And yet...

"Which of you, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn't leave the ninety nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it?"

Life is a funny little thing, isn't it?

I find myself uncertain sometimes of how hard to cling to it. This, coming from a woman who happily weeps when holding a newborn infant and commits to bleary-eyed sobbing at the news of funerals of strangers.

I went through a phase in my young adulthood years, where I often internally acknowledged, "I could die today. And that'd be ok."

I wasn't depressed, mind you. And not obsessed with death, though it sounds it, in the least. Quite the opposite. More: obsessed with living. Fully recognizing that it [life] is not guaranteed to last and fully accepting that living it to the best of my ability was what made that knowledge ok.

And then, during a recent gathering of women who dedicated some discussion time to what our role ought to be following the Parkland shooting, one participant brought an unexpected thing to light. The conversation had been caught up in a whirlwind of emotion, some of us sad, some of us mad, all of us distraught. And this one friend, who happens to be an ICU doc, said, "I think it is important to remember that people die every day. Hundreds. Thousands. Many not in as sexy a way as a school shooting..." I forget exactly how it went from there. I'm pretty sure we weren't buying it... so zero-focused on the current event and its awfulness, the whole school kids thing and the unnecessary senselessness thing making loss of life feel so much worse.

She wasn't downplaying awfulness; she was leveling the playing field of human life and, inter-connectedly, death.

When the towers came down, I remember shortly afterward finding myself in a church van on a road trip returning from leading a church event with two of my 40ish-year-old youth pastors. At the time, I was newly out of college and serving a church as the youth intern, so lost about how to frame the event for the teenagers in my sphere of influence, must less for myself. We stumbled upon the subject in the darkness of those interstate miles and this is what my youth pastor said: "This is how it goes. The facade that peace is guaranteed is nothing more than that: a facade. No nation is exempt from unexpected horrors and history is evidence of that. Loss of life is loss of life. Is it necessary to fabricate spiritual implications?" My. Youth. Pastor. Said. That. I remember being both heavily disturbed and oddly comforted by what seemed like a dismissal... a "What's the big deal? Move on!" response to one of the most devastating losses of collective lives in our country's history and THE most hard hitting events in my own lil ole life.

And then there was the death of our dear Duncan. After four and half months of many joyful and happy moments but mostly while weak and fragile, our little guy suffered two cardiac arrests in the hospital in a short time and was responded to quickly enough by a roomful of docs and nurses and meds each time to be brought back. In the hours that followed, Duncan was not in good shape, and Scott and I spent most of them prayerfully discerning: we felt that God were asking us to let Duncan decide...that we ought not take additional measures were his heart to stop again.

His heart did stop again. And we let it.

For us, loving him best meant not clinging to his life.

I think sometimes it is hard to approach the paradox of life...

One guaranteed to be individually valuable enough to be pursued, followed, sought after by the Divine, even when there are 99 identical bleating back-ups on deck

yet

One also summed up by the word "dust"... part of something, yes, and only separate from the bigger whole for this short time, insignificant compared to the rest.

We are taught to believe deeply that this life matters. And it does. It matters so much that becoming lost while in it will send a search-and-rescue team. How do we live it like it matters that much while keeping loose our grip upon it, resisting the tempting notion that we must fight to keep it?

I don't guess I really know.

But discussion group gal and youth pastor and Duncan all have taught me about perspective. And I think that's the best place to start... When I discover myself gripping, it's usually when I've zoomed in too small. When I zoom out big, I find myself most at peace and in connection with the Divine and ungrippy. It's then that I tend to remember what Perspective has to teach me : God's got this. Always has. Always will. This life isn't all there is. Mine is a life that is part of something bigger.

I'm both a speck of dust and a damn-important sheep.

And this makes me cling loosely.