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Hello again friends, this is Dick Foth and it is a September morning.
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I'm sitting outside and looking at blue sky and bluey clouds, listening to the sounds in the distance of airplanes.
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There's an air show in northern Colorado, so you may hear a few jets.
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But I'm thinking this morning about life.
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And you say, well, isn't that what you usually talk about in the spring?
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Well, I'd like to think I talk about it or think about it every day, but it's true.
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We think about springtime being the blooming of things and the starting of a new season and all of that.
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But I've been thinking about life in no small part because we have five family members who in this month have birthdays.
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My wife, Ruth, for starters, my son, Chris, daughter, Jenny, grandson, Noah, and great-granddaughter, Nora.
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And it's interesting when you read this old Hebrew writing of Ecclesiastes, which if you're feeling a bit down, you probably don't want to go to Ecclesiastes and read
it today.
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because the writer speaks of the entity, the entirety of life as meaningless.
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He has this line at the start of the third chapter that says, there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the sun.
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And when we think about seasons and we're in the third week of September, How can one not think about what we call the autumnal equinox?
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That's a mouthful.
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That means that's when fall starts, September 22nd.
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And the autumnal equinox is that time, and there are two times in the year.
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One is in March called the vernal equinox, and this one, the equal amount of light and darkness.
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Well, that's a fascinating thought.
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But I have to admit that I like light better than darkness.
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and whether it's metaphorical or whether it's real, I like light better than darkness.
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And so from this point on, it continues to get longer times of darkness than of daylight.
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Poets and adult development or human development students and scholars would talk this way about a person's life.
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These are the seasons. Childhood is spring. Adolescence is summer. Fall is middle age. And winter is old age. So what you have today is a winter guy talking about middle
age.
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Actually, I just want to reference the point that life is not only full of joy and celebration and rites of passage and all of that.
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It also has times of immense frustration and tragedy.
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And just last week, we memorialized again September 11, 2001, when thousands of people were killed in that one day in New York City and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania,
in Washington, D.C.
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In the middle of that, last week, essentially, you have the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah.
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And overseas, you have Gaza going on and Ukraine going on and other places, numerous places around where we say, "This is senseless.
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This doesn't, it's not rational." Well, war is not a rational thing.
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Murder is not a rational thing.
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In the middle of that, where do we find hope?
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I find hope in the fact that life goes beyond this.
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That's where I stand, if you will.
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That I believe that life is eternal, that it goes beyond this human condition and the deterioration or the sudden taking of a human life.
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And because of that, there's something to be said for where we find it.
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That passage in the Gospels where the followers of Jesus, a handful of men, said, teach us to pray.
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Other people have taught their disciples to pray.
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You teach us to pray.
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And it came to be known in our time and before as the Lord's Prayer.
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If you come from a liturgical or a Catholic tradition, for example, it's called the Our Father because that's how it starts.
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And in that, Jesus gives both the large picture and the small picture of what life is.
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And it goes like this.
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Our Father, and this is the Elizabethan English, King James Version, it goes like this.
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Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed or holy be thy name.
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Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
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And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
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For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
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Amen.
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It fascinates me that the first few words of the book of Genesis are, let there be light.
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There was darkness, there was chaos, and light chased it away and helped bring order.
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In a time when it feels for many of us chaotic, perhaps for some meaningless, I pray that again.
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Lord, let there be light in a dark time with insights and actions that bring life that goes beyond today to the people around us.
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For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
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Amen.
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God bless you. Catch you next time.
