Indeed, You have made my days as handbreadths and my age is nothing before You. Psalm 39:5

Life is so full of surprises, isn’t it?

A week ago today I drove to New Meadows to pick up the mail and get a few items. It was to be just a quick trip to town and back. Three hours later medics had me strapped into a gurney on a helicopter ride to St. Luke’s in Boise while a tangle of tubing dripped medicines into my arms.   I couldn’t control my left arm, hand and leg which did not want to connect to my brain.

I had had a stroke driving back to the house. My vision went white blind, my head felt like it was filled with concrete and I knew that I was going to pass out any moment.  “God, I prayed, “please don’t let me crash and hurt someone. “ God IS faithful. He protected me and all the other drivers   on the highway near my car. The Eye of God never left me. It was His hands, not mine, which helped drive me safely home.

Forty eight hours – and a revolving door of nurses poking, prodding, testing my reflexes, scrutinizing mental acuity and sticking very sharp objects into my veins later, Dan drove me home from the hospital. I was fully recovered and as good as new. No signs of damage. Left arm and leg awake again. Despite all the latest technological testing, no doctor could say with certainty what had happened or what the cause was. All test were inconclusive. It might have been this. Or perhaps it was something else. Science and medicine simply do not know the life and death things of God.

A day or so later, I went out to the gardens to tend to the peas yellowing on the trellis. The morning was blessedly cool. The sun slanted through the pine branches in pale golden rays of light. A hummingbird hummed. A deer browsed on the hillside and the tree tops danced. A few white pea blossoms curled up inside the  vines.   As I pulled them out of the garden bed, dirt clung to the roots. I smelled the earth, dark and rich as chocolate. As I tugged at the snap pea vines, humus and human touched while God gazed upon me in the garden.   Tears came. Like the earth in my hands, I was created from the dust. Because of the Fall, one day we shall once again return to the dust.

⁷ And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. Genesis 2:7

By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”…Genesis 3:19

But for me, not yet. It appears my days are not done for God  wills me to remain on the planet a while longer. Still, an encounter with mortality is sobering. As such may it teach us to fear God more deeply by knowing that  earthly time is like a vapor.

…”LORD, make me to know my end And what is the extent of my days; Let me know how transient I am. Psalm 39:4

And again,

Man is like a mere breath; His days are like a passing shadow. Psalm 144:4

It wasn’t thinking about dying when I had the stroke nor while recovering in the hospital.  But in those few moments in my garden as I held dirt clods and drying   pea vines in my hands , when tears came unbidden, it was because I understood life’s fragility. It is like a  flower fading all too soon. What then? The world offers no hope for life after this one ends.

The only hope for life which can’t be uprooted is what Jesus offers –  His life for ours.   Salvation promises that life in Christ now and eternal life with Him  after death  will never fade, will never dissipate like a vapor and will never wither like pea vines at summer’s end.