“. . .when you take away their breath, 

they die and return to the dust. 

 When you send your Spirit, 

they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.” 

 Psalm 104:29-30

On Thursday, the classroom was overheated—the afternoon sun poured in through the windows; the heat felt like a wall. “Let’s go outside,” kids said. In a couple minutes we were seated in green grass beneath the outstretched arms of a massive maple.

I talked too much, as old teachers do—or as I do anyway; and when it was over I told myself the hour and a half probably seemed to them little more than words.

Then I got an e-mail from Sarah. “I hope you are having a good day!” it said. “I greatly enjoyed your lecture today. It was wonderful to sit outside.”

I felt like the teacher of the year.

Even though all of us have an infinite need to be loved, that insatiable appetite can be filled, at least for a time, by two short lines in an e-mail. So very little.

A week ago, my wife took her mother off to a regional hospital for a surgery that eventually didn’t happen—her mother’s condition was too fragile. Today, we count what remains of her life in teaspoons, day by day. Her mother would much rather that it was over, her life. Every day, we simply wait and pray.

That very same morning, at the very same moment, my daughter was up early, holding back tears because her daughter, her first child—was going off to her first day of kindegarten.

On one clear morning last week, we felt the ominous heft of last rites and the cheerful blessing of first things. Such is life.

Yesterday, two precious letters arrived. One from the aging parents of woman who died of ovarian cancer, a woman I helped by arranging her journals into a narrative of her dying. They were very thankful for her book, they said. We keep it beside the couch, they wrote, in spidery handwritten lines, and we pick it up often during the day.

The other letter asked for photographs. It came from a woman whose husband, a wonderful and much-beloved writer, is dying of lung cancer. “Could you send some 8 x 10s?” she asked. “The cards you sent with those pictures of the dawn have been such blessings to us.”

I’ll do it today.

Last night, my wife and I went out on a date—a ritual of sorts—barbeque ribs at a joint across the river. On the drive home, a deer stopped along the road, looked at us for a moment, then loped off through a field of gorgeous yellowing soybeans. When we came home, we made love.

Life is so precious, it’s joys so brittle, so sweet—a few good words, a dawn, a little barbeque sauce, an acquaintance with a deer, cherished flesh shared, and all of it made more precious, surely, by the imminent reality of dying.

All of which is, by my reckoning at least, the subject of Psalm 104. Our lives are precarious and in his hands. He owns our breath. He’s the God of collapsed veins and kindergartens, of overheated rooms and postal delivery. To him belong our moments of death and the joys of our lives. That’s what the psalmist says in 104.

___________________________ 

This meditation, as all of them, every Sunday, have been coming from Sixty at Sixty. In some cases, that means an occasional few, like this one, are twenty years old. That kindergartner got married last month.