The latest issue of Rolling Stone contains a poignant article about a person named Tomas Young, a veteran of the Iraq War, who is in such intense pain from various war injuries that next month, in May, he plans to unplug his feeding tube and die.  Although they understand, his wife and friends wish that he would not, that he would decide to live and continue to inspire them with his example of steadfastness in the face of immense hardship and pain.
     What would you tell Mr. Young?  Would you tell him to live?  Would you tell him to die?  It's hard to say.  His life is a living caldron of pain.  Regardless of how we view the nature of this life, that is, whether we believe it to be the only one or merely the beginning of another, we might say the same thing.  Why?  If we believe this life is the only one, then we might want Mr. Young to keep going, for he will never be "going" again.  It's his only shot at existence, pain and all.  But if we believe that this life is the ground of another one, then we might also want him to keep going, for the only reason that there is another life is that there is a God who gave us this life in the first place.  Either way, we are not our own.  We did not ask to be born.
     Eternal or not, life is an unspeakably fragile and precious gift.  Absent the love of God, however, all the pain of this life is just that:  pain without an explanation.  And then it's over.  Forever.
     It's probably too easy for me to say this, as I do not know the depth of his despair, but I hope that Tomas Young finds, before he goes, what life and God's love are really all about.