A couple of weeks ago, the morning of November 17, a young man named Nicholas Mevoli attempted to break the existing record for free diving, that is, diving as far down as one could get without using any artificial aids or additional oxygen.
     The record was 70 meters; Mevoli was aiming for 72.  When he reached 69 meters, however, for reasons no one knows, he paused, seemed to hesitate, then continued down.  He made his way back to the surface safely.  However, once he removed his goggles, he began to cough up blood.  He died an hour and a half later.  It's a tragic story.
     What struck me most about this story was the achingly painful fact of a life lost so young for a relatively arcane reason, a life that was once infused with the most fervent of dreams, the most compelling of drives, now a life over, forever.  Many young lives are of course lost every moment of every day, most of them, unfortunately, from causes that are preventable, such as hunger, disease, and accidents.  Yet this lost life seems, at least to me, to take on a hue and shade of its own, a life, and a short one at that, spent pursuing a goal of which very few people in the world are aware, a life devoted to vision of which only a handful of humanity even cares about.  And now it's over.
     This is not to say that Mevoli's life was not important or valuable.  If God exists, it surely was.  We mourn his passing.  It is to say, however, that as the writer of Ecclesiastes 11 reminds us, seek adventure, seek challenge; yet remember this:  life is ultimately out of our hands.  We walk in a shadow we do not make.
     So I conclude:  thanks be to God for existential purpose--and for presenting himself in his son Jesus for us to see it.