Impermanence, surrounded by fluidity and change.  What is this life that I should count anything worthy of my dependence or surety?  My flesh is easily breached, scarred, chained and lasts nothing more than one hundred or so years.  My mind perchance may stay cognizant throughout but even that at the center of my self-image is short lived.  What calls me to place so much weight upon something so transient.  Is it necessary to maintain sanity?  Must I imagine myself long-lasting, ignoring the truth of man’s short existence in order to quench my fear of inevitable demise?  Why, yes, of course that is the measure of man’s fear and frankly his immature unwillingness to come to grips with mortality.

But why fear begin mortal if that is what it means to be mortal?  Fearing the truth of my longevity does not transform the truth of its inevitability, neither does it transform me into a being that lives beyond normalcy.  Why then must I avoid the truth of my life, relatively short as it appears?  There are only two possibilities; one, this is it, this short life is all that we are given and therefore prolonging our lives even for a few short years remains our only hope of continuance and two that there is an afterlife that holds an accountability for how we lived during this short time.  For regrets of a life poorly or well lived only matter if there is afterlife during which we reflect upon how we once lived.

Without afterlife conscience matters not.  For my prescience contributes little to a history of man content to chase the same spoils of fleshly impermanence.  It is our indomitable spirit that craves things less fragile than humanity.  Evolution would not make the dominant species so easily broken, so readily dispatched into silence.  We were designed for a short term purpose that requires our fragility lending toward tempo-rarity. Again we were made to die early and remain relatively vulnerable.  It is permanence we seek, we don’t like sickness, death, fragility, scarcity of time or weakness.  This distaste leads us directly to the humility at God’s feet.  For we lack that which we most desire the time and opportunity to do it right.  We are either men dependent upon the rules, graces and intercessory action of God to reach something akin to eternity or we believe that somehow we will find some personal route to the everlasting.  I cannot even understand my wife never-mind find myself clever enough to create a window to continued existence past mortality.

What God says is rational, real and dependable.  We may either believe upon His graces and be saved to spend eternity free from the fragility of this world or we may seek separation from Him, in which case we are subjected to the rules and consequences He has deemed for said departed.  Either way our lives are temporary so we ought make the best of them.  The best I can do is tell you how to escape the temporary harshness, loss and limitations of an unimpressive mortal life by believing that this is just the training ground for what lay beyond the veil or mortality.  We shall be with Him in eternity, timeless, united, permanent.  That is okay with me.  In Jesus name.