As I read recently an account of the final days of former ISIS hostage James Foley, and pondered how he felt as he sensed his days drawing to a close (for those who have been living in a cave, James Foley was the first person ISIS publicly beheaded, later posting the entire deed on You Tube for all the world to see), I thought often about the riddle of existence.  For James Foley, life is unfortunately over.  He won't be back.  For him, existence is no more.  (On the other hand, as Foley converted, sincerely, to Islam during his imprisonment, he surely died believing that he would soon be with Allah in Paradise.)
     And for us, life goes on.  When I look at James Foley's life, however, I cannot help but see life as an enormous fishbowl, a fishbowl in which we all are swimming, yet a fishbowl into which we did not ask to be.  It's a fishbowl we know nothing about other than we are in it.  Yet we go on living in it.  And one day, we no longer will.
     And even if a personal and infinite transcendence exists, life remains a conundrum. On the one hand, the Hebrew Bible advises, "Whatever you do, do with all your might."  On the other hand, the New Testament commands, "Do your work heartily, as unto the Lord." Two perspectives, the one rooted in materiality, the other centered on transcendence, yet both speaking into one existence.  So we walk, all of us, a fine line between what we see and what we cannot, some of us believing that the former is all there is, others believing that both are present, the one subsisting on the hope of this life only, the other on the hope of one beyond it.  Either way, we live in what we perceive stands before us.
     Therein is the issue:  without transcendence, without an eternal and infinite personal, there is no meaningful, and honest, way to really know.
     Be well, James Foley.