On Birth and Death

On Birth and Death
Job 10: 1-22

Yesterday a girl in her twenties was telling me about the death of her grandmother a day or two before. Like many people of her generation, she was very close to her grandmother, and the loss is a significant one. And yesterday another young woman within my wife’s extended family was in labor with her first baby, who is to be named after my stepdaughter. It seems only weeks since we heard that this young woman was going to have a baby, and we have imagined the gradual growth within the womb that nowadays one can even monitor visually through ultrasound. There is nothing greater than the difference between life and death, yet they can come into strange juxtapositions in our lives...