A full life, overflowing with good things – birth, planting, healing, building, laughing, dancing.
Yet a life marked by loss – death, uprooting, killing, tearing down, weeping, mourning. It’s a picture of life we recognise from the book of Genesis, which also tells us why life is like this: life is a gift from a generous and life-giving God. But this gift of life has been fundamentally damaged by humanity turning from God.
Though we pass through these different seasons and times, we are not in control: our lives are book-ended by birth and death, neither of which we have power to stop. God is God, we are human, and our lives are lived within limits set by him.
Through Christ we have the extraordinary possibility of recovering life as it was meant to be: life lived with God, rather than without him. Armed with this great possibility all of life is transformed. For God is present with us in the darkness as well as in the light, unrelenting in his purpose to give us life, and through Christ to defeat everything that damages and threatens our lives.
Whatever season we are passing through, may the life-presence of God fill us with hope today.
