by Kim Thoday

I was recently involved in one of our Church’s small groups where we were asked to consider what life is. Our small group facilitator handed each of us a coloured piece of paper with a picture on it and the caption: “Life is .” We were then invited to fill in the blank . Helpful discussion followed. One participant said that “Life is experience and mystery, not to be feared or wasted, but discovered.” Another participant offered that “Life is like a summer harvest that follows a winter sowing (you reap what you sow). Life is sometimes like a football team that requires a strong centre half forward. Life is sometimes like being a salmon that swims upstream.”

For me, Life is Miracle, it is Mystery and it is Made. Life is thoroughly a miracle. It is a miracle because it exists – and that existence is not a product of human ingenuity – it is beyond us. Life is a mystery because it refuses to be limited by rational explanation. Albert Einstein was surely profoundly right when he said that: “The only thing incomprehensible about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Yet while ‘the cosmic code’ has been partially cracked by physicists (products of that very code!), that same self-awareness can no more adequately explain love than could the ancient mind. Life is made, because it is human self-awareness that makes meaning and constructs realities precisely because of its dialectical interplay between knowing and unknowing, consciousness and unconsciousness, rational and irrational, logic and limitation, life and death.

Kim Thoday

Hewett Community Church of Christ, South Australia http://www.hewett.org.au