Lent 2022, Day 30


 

You have made my days a mere handbreadth;

  the span of my years is as nothing before you.

Everyone is but a breath,

  even those who seem secure.

Psalm 39:5

Acknowledging our mortality is always a fun exercise. Our culture does its best to scrub away reminders of our ultimate exit, allowing us to live in a state of shallowly cheerful denial. But death and taxes, baby. These lives of ours are short, and these bodies of ours are fragile. It’s coming for us all. Lent is a good time to remind ourselves of this and to make adjustments as to how we’re moving through this brief and beautiful life.

Which brings me to dogs. It seems wrong, unfair, cruel, that their lives are so brutally short. They are a burst of joy and energy and life that burns brightly and then is just gone. (This is actually confirmed by science—dogs’ cells develop and degrade much faster than human cells.) They are fully present … until they’re not. And we live in dread of saying goodbye, of inevitably having our hearts broken again—and yet we willingly, even eagerly, seek out the next source of heartache. We are interesting beasts, choosing again and again to pay the high price of love. But then again, maybe we were designed this way, with this fatally beautiful flaw.

I look at Calvin and Feynman and Libby and am filled with love and annoyance and love and gratitude and love. What a gift they are to me! Yes, their lives are “but a breath,” but goodness me, what they bring to my little world, to my little handbreadth of time.

Thank you, God, for this life and for these lives.

#lent2022 #rescuedogsofinstagram #repentandbelieve #bibleinoneyear

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