Yesterday I talked about the fleetingness of life in light of the recent passing of the twin sister of the Shah of Iran.  Today I write about life's brevity as I consider the passing last year of blogger Lisa Bonchek Adams.  Born in 1969, Adams wrote bravely and vividly about her struggle with cancer.
     As she neared her end, Adams endeavored to set it in very plain and ordinary terms. An atheist, she believed acutely that once she died, she was forever gone.  Her story, as she saw it, would be definitively over.
     Many years ago, I spoke to an atheist about death and dying.  He told me that in fact he envied people who believe in a good God and good afterlife, that he would appreciate the existential comfort that this would bring him.  However, he added, he could not reconcile God's goodness with the fact of death and suffering in the world.  For him, they did not fit together.
     Set before the maw of cancer, God seems futile.  He doesn't stop it, he doesn't end it. Like Adams, why should we then believe in him?  If I tell you it is because God has a wonderful afterlife for you and that death is not the end, you may then wonder why you had to endure the pain of cancer in the first place.  What was the point?  Why couldn't God's goodness flood my life in this present existence as well?
     This is an incredibly difficult question to answer.  Without going on page after page after page, yet in view of life's fleetingness, however, I will say this:  though the hope of the world is indeed essential and grand, it is only so because the hope of God enables its present hope to be real, palpable, and true.
     Otherwise, hope, however emotional and reassuring it may be--and it is--loses itself in its existence.