reflections from the living world

In order to truly appreciate something, sometimes it helps to experience the absence of it:

To know and appreciate life, I am grateful to have seen the absence of life. To know light, I am thankful for darkness.

With deep gratitude for the living world, I leave behind the uninhabitable part of earth. By grace I do not live to die, but to find life in Christ; I step from the darkness into a defeating light.

By seeing the uninhabitable, imperfect, or incomplete, perhaps we have that much greater a regard for the hope of something perfect to come.