As our Muslim friends around the world venture ever more deeply into Ramadan (which began June 17), I think often of the painfully timed spate of high temperatures that swept across Pakistan recently, killing over one thousand people.  Of particular tragedy is that this heat wave occurred during a time when devout Muslims strive to avoid drinking any liquids from dawn to sunset.  This left many of them with insufficient bodily resources to deal with the heat's effects.
     To their credit, however, the devout carried on, praying, reading, gathering, and more, in every way continuing their Ramadan journey.  Nonetheless, they could not forget their fallen soulmates.  As my Muslim friend Hashim shared with me, "We weep over these deaths."
     So like the Jews of the Maccabean period wept over their murdered comrades or the early Christians who grieved for their martyred companions, so do Pakistan's Muslims, in the midst of their festivities, remember those who have fallen.  To view and interpret the world through the lens of faith is to keep a delicate balance between life and death.  If life is eternal, death is a door; if life is also the present, however (which it clearly is), its loss ends what we now know.  To have faith is to love life even while embracing its successor, yet it is also to love, thoroughly and completely, the present.  A loss is a loss is a loss.
     In the eyes of faith, however, in the end, loss is gain.  Life or death, God remains.