If you do not spend much time reading annals of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, you probably have not have heard about Henry Worsley.  One of the most well known cold weather explorers today, Worsley died while attempting to be the first person to make the first unaided crossing of the vast and desolate mass of ice that we call Antarctica.  A life long admirer of the storied Antarctic explorer Ernst Shackelton (whose adventures are chronicled in the book Endurance), Worsley was trying to do what Shackelton, for all his strength and courage, did not.  (Shackleton died at fifty, victim of a heart attack.)
     Perhaps the most tragic dimension of Worsley's death was that he was forced to halt his quest barely thirty miles from its end.  Citing extreme exhaustion, he made one of the most difficult decisions of his life:  he called for help.  Unfortunately, when doctors began examining him in a hospital to which he was airlifted in Chile, they discovered that he had developed bacterial peritonitis.  So advanced was the infection that at the point they could do nothing for him.  He died of advanced organ failure.  He was fifty-five.
     Yet Worsley died doing what he loved doing most:  exploring one of the least explored regions of the planet.  As one who has explored many parts of the Arctic (not the Antarctic), I can readily testify to the remarkable wonder and beauty of the polar regions. Stark and austere, yet marvelously and enticingly alive, they speak of the joy of mystery, solitude, and desolation, the sublimity of travel that takes us well out of our comfort zone. They show us another side, the side of existence that, as Ecclesiastes puts it, is about "mourning" and not "feasting."
     Not that we should not "feast" on life.  God wants us to enjoy his creation.  Yet by journeying into realms which demand challenge and deprivation, we come to know more fully what life's "feast" means.  We understand why we need mourning as much as we need feasting.  We reduce our existence to its most fundamental truth.  In the end, whether we feast or mourn, we walk, as Paul put it, "in a riddle," sojourners and inquirers in the vast cosmos of God.
     It's about life, our most precious gift.  Use it circumspectly, use it wisely.  It is, to use a very old adage, the only one we have.
     Consider your life as the fruit of God.