Have you heard Johannes Brahms's Requiem?  Based on words from Psalm 90, Requiem is surely one of the most powerful pieces of music Brahms (whose birthday we remember this month) composed.  It is a profound reminder of our humanness, our fragility, our mortality.  "Teach us, Lord," it says, "to number our days so that we will develop a heart of wisdom."

     We are not forever on this planet.
     The Requiem also uses a line from Isaiah 40, "All flesh is grass."  How can we not agree?  Magnificent though we be, we are in truth "grass," here today, gone tomorrow:  we are so frightfully evanescent.  Who will ever know that we were born?
     Reams have been written about whether  Brahms believed in the worldview behind these words, but that's not the point.  Our lives are gifts, gifts which we have for a very short time.  If the universe is unconscious and impersonal, our lives are gifts in the darkness of a purposeless cosmos, a shout into nothingness.  If on the other hand the universe is personal, the conscious expression of a conscious God, our life is a gift of profound purpose.  Brief though it still may be, its brevity happens in a wider umbra of time and destiny.  We are grass, yes, but we are grass that, even if it fades and dies, will eventually burst forth again.