Life is a Gift

Life is a gift from God—from beginning to end; from highs to lows; from downs to ups; through the rollercoaster and along the highways. Life is a gift from God. That’s what the writer of the poem from Ecclesiastes 3 is trying to say. Everything, absolutely everything about life, is a gift—whether you find it so or not; whether it feels like it sometimes or never; whether you feel that you’re prepared for it all, or not prepared for anything. Life is still a gift from God. And that includes death.

Death is a part of the gift of life given to us, given to us as creatures, as the glorious creation of God. We are human, we are mortal. We are born, we live and we die. All of it is gift. “There is a season… for every matter under heaven (v. 1)”.

And yet there are some things in life that are not as easy to accept, not as easy to confront than others; and death is one of those things, because death reminds us that the gift of life that we’ve been given is a fragile one. The gift of life is a fragile, fleeting, even fickle one. It doesn’t run smoothly. We don’t get to choose how everything turns out for us. We don’t get to choose when we are born and when we die; and we don’t get to choose what struggles we may face or avoid, what pleasures we may enjoy or miss out on. All of it, all of life, the good, the bad, and the ugly comes to us as gift—a wonderful, bewildering, confusing gift from God.

And in the midst of this bewilderment, in the midst of this confusion, in the midst of this wonderment, we are called to live out our lives in the best way we can. The writer of Ecclesiastes continues after the poem:

9 What gain have the workers from their toil? 10I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. 11He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; 13moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. 14I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. 15That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.

Of course, living out the life that has been given to us is not easy. It is challenging and it is demanding. But it is what we are called to as the glorious creation of God that we are.

So today, we honour one of us who lived the life she was gifted by God. She was human like us with foibles like us; with dreams and hopes, fulfilled and unfulfilled—just like us; with achievements and failures—just like us. And all of this was gift—gift to her; and gift to us—for she was one of us.

We remember her as one of us. We celebrate her life. We mourn her death. And we honour the God who gifted her to us and created this wonderful, bewildering life for us all.