After an unplanned hiatus, I return to offering my thoughts for kind (I hope!) consideration.  Driving home from the swimming pool the other day, I heard an old rock song, this one by a long since gone band called Bad Company.  It's called "Shooting Star." In it, we hear the singer tell us a story about a man called Johnny who, despite everything, is a shooting star, a special human being, and who, through all the ups and downs of his life, lived, and died, in grace and peace.
     If I can expand the purview of the song a bit, I note that there is much truth to it. Genesis tells us that we are all created in the image of God, carefully and lovingly wrought as uniquely sentient entities, singularly equipped to live in a way all our own upon this planet.  As Sly and the Family Stone sang decades ago, "Everybody is a star."
     And so we are.  As the song points out, however, we are "shooting" stars.  Do shooting stars last indefinitely?  No:  anyone who has had the good fortune to see a shooting star (which are actually meteorites, sometimes comets) blazing its way across a dark night sky knows that their glory is short.  They're gone almost as soon as we see them.
     So are we.  We are glorious, yes, we are wonderful, indeed, but we are very, very short.  Even if we live to be a hundred or more, in the immense canvas of history and time, we are but a blip, and an infinitesimal blip at that.  Yet if we are in fact created in the image of an infinite God, we can know and believe that even if we are shooting stars, we are shooting stars in the umbra of eternal meaning.
     We are more than this life.