Have you ever noticed how life insists?
A trimmed tree branch, or even a cut-down tree, will sprout new branches. Little flowers will poke through cracks in asphalt on even the most-traveled streets. People find their way through grief to healing. Indeed, life has insisted on being for more than 13 billion years, ever since time and space, energy and matter flashed forth in the singular singularity we call the “Big Bang.” Life has continued to emerge in ever-increasing complexity and diversity and beauty.
“I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life….” (Deuteronomy 30:17, 19)
“So you must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
(Romans 6:11)
“”In spite of natural timidity, I have always felt invincible before hostile forces precisely because I have been ‘redeemed.’ This means that I have all of the power I need to face down evil. I have the power, therefore, to choose life under any circumstances….redemption means that we are freed from the attraction and power of evil, free to choose life-giving options and life-enhancing goals.”
(Sr. Rosie Bertell, essay included in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, p. 195, emphasis added)
No one can make us do evil,
no one can make us stop loving,
no one can kill our hope.
We have the power to choose life and love.
Former Vice-President Al Gore puts it this way in talking about addressing climate disruption:
“When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. We have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will to act. But I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.”
(Al Gore in a TEDTalk given 2/25/16, accessed on YouTube 7/18/17)
These trying times are an exhilarating time to be alive, as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. discovered during the trying times in which the civil rights and anti-war movements arose. There’s so much opportunity all around us to do good, so speak up for what’s right, to reach out in love, to be life. We have everything we need. We have the power to choose.
The Creator, creation and our own spirits implore us and cheer us on:
Choose Life!
Be Life!
L’Chaim!
image credit: Karen MacDonald