After running through a forest preserve the other morning, I came home, fixed myself some tea, and sat down to read through the ninth chapter of Ecclesiastes.  I read about its assertion of the futility of existence, that in the end it will not matter what we do, good or bad, for we all will die anyway.  Death has no favorites.
     (And I wondered whether like my father, who died at the age of 63, I would, too. Again:  death has no favorites.)
     Then I read through some chapters in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, wondering about its precise meaning, wondering precisely how John's vision of the end of the world will really be expressed in the span of human history and time.  Will there really be massive lights and flames in the sky?  Will there really be angels sounding trumpets across the planet?  Will there really be a plague of some type of locust that will kill one third of humankind?  Are there really glassy seas in heaven?  How will the world really end?
     No doubt, some of these descriptions are figurative, and no doubt that the person who had this vision lived in a very different time from our own, many historical miles from the abundant scientific technology we possess for exploring cosmological variants today.  Yet maybe that's not the point.  I think most of us can agree that death has no favorites, and I think that all of us can agree that when we die we will no longer be physically attached to our earthly achievements.  Death is thoroughly black and white.  We're either alive, or we are dead.  There's nothing in between.
     Where we might differ is the extent to which, as Revelation sees it, God will intervene in the world as it approaches its final days.  So what can we learn from comparing these very different passages of scripture?  Two things.  One, life means more, right now, because it ends.  We do not know our time.  We therefore strive to make every minute count.  Two, even though the world will one day come to an absolute end, if God, in some way, is working through it, this end means more than itself.  It will also be a beginning. And we likewise endeavor to make every moment of life count, for each moment rests not only in a catastrophic nothingness of stardust and plasma, but in the tangible vision of a personal and infinite God.