Last week, I got some shocking news.  One of my favorite professors in graduate school, a woman who published a ground breaking book on feminist theology and later became a highly admired university administrator, announced that she had been diagnosed with Alzheimers Disease.  She's not yet seventy years old.

    It's a tragic end to a good life.  Although my mind and heart were running in many directions as I tried to process what I was hearing, one constant was a memory of a verse from the Hebrew book of Ecclesiastes.  Set at the beginning of chapter nine, it reads, "For I have taken this to my heart and explain it that the righteous and and wise and their deeds are in the hand of God.  People do not know whether it will be love or hatred; anything awaits them."

    Life can be the cruelest of bargains.  And God can be the most confounding of mysteries.  Yet we cannot have one without the other to render either one meaningful in the present moment.

    I wish my professor the best.