Here today.

Begin with the assumption that God exists.

Although this post is not an argument in favor of a Creator God, I am fairly certain there is one.

My belief springs not from faith but from being a creator myself. The labor of building a fictive world is intense.

Imagine imagining and constructing a functional universe that actually exists.

I know the argument that given enough time, monkeys with typewriters could write the plays of Shakespeare. But, having worked at the Baltimore Zoo when it was under the directorship of the flamboyant Arthur Watson, I have practical experience with monkeys and typewriters.

Testing the theory, the director had monkeys type and then set humans to work circling words. Whole pages would go by with nothing circled. The handful of words that did appear were hardly impressive: at, on, go, it, and even those words were gleaned from long strings of random letters.

This universe is too complex, interconnected, clever and humorous to be the work of random monkeys. At some point you have to give Shakespeare credit.

So, begin with my assumption that God exists and is the source of all that is in your life: sunny days, chocolate, warm hands, green leaves, naps, immortality—

Wait…what?

Immortality?

Everything else on that list is verifiable, tangible, a bird in the hand.

The inclusion of immortality, while it has some basis in the accounts of the life of a man named Jesus, cannot be proven.

Still we want it, even claim it as the gold watch awarded for years of faithful service.

To me, immortality sounds like a greedy human addition to the list. In demanding immortality we are like the kid who tears the paper off a whole bunch of really cool Christmas presents and then gets mad because Santa didn’t include a pony.

Would the gift of life be paltry if it really ended with death? Would you have turned down that gift had you known the batteries would last for just so long and that you couldn’t get any more?

Scale back the definition of immortality and you realize, here, in this life, we do have a modest but verifiable form of continued existence. Our genes swim on through the generations. The people we have influenced share what they learned from us. Our stories, especially if they’re good ones, persist.

A life, like a rock dropped in water, sends out ripples.

“Yeah, but what good does it do me if I no longer exist?

None.

But does the fact that life is finite negate the gift?

If God exists you have been the beneficiary of infinite generosity, but you are just one scintilla in a stream of creation.

Even I, a stringer of words,understand that the impulse of creation moves on.

As you read this we are riding the crest of a living story, but teeming all around us are new lives that will snatch the story and rush with it into a chapter we may never read. That the story goes on, although we as individuals may not, comforts me.

I hope for immortality. Reincarnation would be my preference because I love this earth.

But if this is it, I remain grateful.

Note: I drafted this post sometime last weekend. On Tuesday I was in a car wreck and spent the rest of the week in the hospital with a broken pelvis. It will be a long time before I am the mobile, carelessly alive person I was when I wrote this post. My theoretical contemplation of mortality became very real but did nothing to diminish my gratitude.