“A voice commands, ‘Cry out!’ and I answer, ‘What will I say?’ All flesh is grass and its beauty is like the wildflowers: the grass withers and the flower wilts when the breath of YHWH blows on them. How the people are like grass! Grass withers and flowers wilt, but the promise of our God will stand forever.  (Isaiah 40:6-8)*

I often find myself participating in “A Service of Death and Resurrection,” or its contemporary equivalent, for people I have known well. It reminds me each time of that which is never far from my mind: our mortality.

Like the grass of the field and the flowers of the garden, we are planted, we sprout, we are nurtured into full growth, we mature, we bear fruit, wither, and eventually we die. No one is exempt from the full course of this journey, although, for some, it may be cut short by disease or violence.

So it is that generations come and generations go, but in all truth: “the word of our God will stand forever!” Before there were homo sapiens at all, there was God. If in time our species should die out, as many species have done, often at our hands, God is, was, and ever shall be.

The challenge of this brief life is to discover what “the Word of our God” calls us to be and to do. Our struggle is to fulfill that understanding: to “walk the talk.”

We are called to bear “the fruit of the Spirit...love, joy, peace, patient endur-ance, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Paul to the Galatians, 5:22-23a*) Micah said, “God has already more abundantly clear what ‘good’ is, and what YHWH needs from you: simply do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with YHWH”. (Micah 6:8*)

And Jesus? This is what he said: “It isn’t those who cry out, ‘My Savior! My Savior’ who will enter the kingdom of heaven; rather it is those who do the will of Abba God in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21*)