Part the Second

Life ain’t easy.

It’s a slider followed by a fastball, a change of speed just as we think we’ve got the pitcher’s game plan deciphered. Baseball metaphors, perhaps, aren’t the most succinct way to put it. What I’m trying to say is, none of us knows what comes next. No one can make plans with certainty. In large part, the great happenings of our lives are beyond the pale of our control.

^“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.”

(My mother accuses me of such a dreary outlook on life that pessimism is too cheery a word to describe me. Yes, I drift that way–although I’m moored to the sunny shores of optimism by Michael’s ever-fervent belief that all will be well.)

Last week, I traveled in an area that was devastated several years ago by a natural disaster. People died, the parents and children and friends of those whose homes we sat in and whose dinners we ate.

Homes turned to rubble. Stones hurtled down the mountain. Life was never, ever the same.

Sitting on dank and crowded buses, I hear the idle chatter: “at the time, it was this way. But now…”

There was before, and there was after. Years later, in the midst of weekday conversations, life is still divided by one unalterable event.

Does that sound familiar?

I recently heard someone say the great event of his life happened millennia ago. Years ago, in the midst of weekday comings and goings, life was divided by one unalterable event.

There was before, and there was after.

“This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.”

We get to live in the after.