Poor Tom Petty.  Barely a month ago, he told an interviewer that he was finished with touring, that he didn't wish to be away from his grandchildren anymore.  Now, sadly, he will not see his grandchildren at all.  At sixty-six, his life is over.
     And it ended in the most abrupt of ways:  cardiac arrest.  No sign, no warning.  Just gone.  In the broad span of human history, of course, one life seems frightfully insignificant.  In a way, it is.  But to those to whom that life was connected, it is everything.
     As it is for God.  Jesus didn't die for a shapeless semblance of humanness.  He died for unique and special and individual human beings.  For Jesus, for God, one life is everything.  It is one less manifestation of goodness in his world.
     I mourn for Tom Petty, I mourn for his family, I mourn for the music world's loss.  He wrote some great music.  And I rejoice in the gifts God gave him, and grateful that Petty used what he was given.  Yet I weep at the powerful truth of humanness:  we are magnificent and wondrous pieces of dust.
     To quote Ecclesiastes, "Remember your creator."  Rest well, Tom Petty.