Today is a big day.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion people around the world:  the Hindu festival of Diwali.  A joyous occasion, Diwali is known as the festival of lights, full of decoration, celebration, and rejoicing over the fact of life and the gods who give it.
     And what could be wrong with this?  Life, however we might like to think about it, can be nothing more--and nothing less--than a gift from God.  Otherwise, it is little more than a random occasion, a capricious occurrence, something in which we have found ourselves, raw and unknown, and told we must live it.  As the late evolutionary biologist William Provine acknowledged, if life is random, we are no more than plops, born only to die.  There is no meaning.
     Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for your gift.  Along the way, as Ecclesiastes 12 exhorts us, "Remember your creator," the one from whom, as the old hymn goes, "All things come."
     Including you.