Life is Precious

Dear Friends,

What’s precious to you?   Precious means beyond price.  Precious time, precious thought, precious gift. The word has been in common use since 1595, although Isaiah used it in the 8^th century BC to tell us what people mean to God. “You are precious in my sight and I love you. (Isaiah 43.4)”

All of life can be described as inestimably precious, anywhere, anytime, in any circumstance:
at birth or at the end of a gun. Life is precious. The three Americans who confronted a would be terrorist on the train from Brussels to Paris last week understood that life is precious.

That thought flits in and out of our consciousness, but is not our first thought in an argument, in depression, or in frustration when our talents are rejected. We develop the love of life as precious.

For example, life is vastly enriched when it is shared with others, or explored with a telescope or a wide angle-lens. Life is even more precious when what we value and what we dream finds an echo in other human hearts. Human life is precious when we give ourselves up to play, when we dance and laugh and do horrendously funny things. It is enriched  when we share our daily bread with others in the market places of life.

Human life alone is precious, but when we are salt, leaven and light for one another, when we call forth one another’s gifts, when we ask God-questions of one another and acknowledge with our lives that Jesus is Lord that  precious life grows deeper, richer, warmer.

I hope we believe this, or at least suspect that this is so, because what follows is that we need to say so by our lives. We need to expend and expand ourselves, invest and divest ourselves and dare to be and do what is needed, individually and as a community.

We know so much and yet so little about ourselves and what the Gospel means or doesn’t mean for our lives. Collected and focused, our own individual ideas, talents, sense of the timely and appropriate have  the power to move the community to a new sense of humanity with the Gospel as our sourcebook.

We are also people of varied taste and uneven growth, so we need options in life as well as convinced, committed relationships. Life is universally precious but not all life is precious in the same way.

With new or renewed conviction, now, at the end of summer, let’s try anew to root ourselves in our church community and let that community help us re-image and live the truth that life is precious.

~Sister Joan Sobala