Even as I remember what would have been my father's ninety-ninth birthday, I think about one of our neighbors who passed away over the weekend at the age of ninety.  My wife and I had known Vera for over twenty years.  We knew her two sons, too, men whom she raised on her own after she many years ago separated from her husband.  We had grown to love and appreciate them as much as we did Vera.  All of us were at her beside when she died.
     Vera believed in Jesus, she believed in God.  Although like all of us she didn't always grasp, fully, all the implications of her belief and how it fueled and shaped her ultimate destiny, she knew enough to know that, when she took her last breath, she was in God's hands.  And as I reflect on her passing today, I cannot think of much more that one would need.
     After announcing that he had come to believe in God, British philosopher and former atheist Anthony Flew observed that he wasn't sure about eternity.  Living forever?  It's a lot to swallow.  I certainly relate.  This side of death or, as singer Robert Plant put it, before the "final curtain," eternity seems like an eminently unfathomable concept.  And from the standpoint of finitude, it is.
     But that's the point.  If this life was only finite, why would we need anything else?