Preciousness of Life

I strive. I run faster. I run further. I reach in my career. I reach in my family life. I reach in my music playing.

I encourage each of my sons to reach. I encourage each person I mentor to strive. All of this is focused on attainment.

Attainment is wonderful.

Attainment without love is meaningless.

Attainment without a sense of why one is attaining and a moral guide leaves me nowhere.

I am lucky to have the love and the sense of why and the moral guide.

But sometimes I forget how easily those can slip away.

How life itself can be taken from us.

Yesterday, I read that a colleague lost his eight year old son—to what was thought to have been a blood infection.

I have been known to have little to speak. I rarely find myself at a loss for written words. Yesterday was such a day. Other than “I am so sorry” there are no words that I could think of to express the devastation of having a child die at such a tender age.

I will end this morning not with my own words but with the words of my colleague. And then I will take a moment of silence. In his wisdom, my colleague wrote, “It wasn't what God said to Job that mattered, it was that he spoke. We wait to hear his voice.”