i don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes when i’m reading, i’ll come across a passage that totally puts words to some sort of inner twinge that i’ve felt for some time. this happened today with this passage:

“Given such courage [made available by Christ's redeeming work], we can admit the glimpses of death present in our everyday life. Fall leaves–at once fire-spangled and decayed, burning with color and dry as dust, beautiful and sad–speak of death. The quiet withering away of a friendship or movement from one job to another, simple goodbyes, episodes of forgetfulness, the realization that no moment or experience can ever be exactly duplicated: all these are little deaths. They demonstrate to us that, this side of our resurrection, all things change, melt, fade, or otherwise pass away. They are signs, like glints in a moving mirror or reflections in a passing car window, of our mortality and the mortality of everything and everyone we love on this earth. We can expend energy trying to ignore these reminders. But Christian spirituality presents another way. It calls us to see them as they are, shot through with pain. And without pretending there is no pain, it calls us to see them in the light of their transformation in Christ and the lasting joys of resurrection happiness. The question then is not, How do we hold on to our earthly joys and try to keep them just as they are, as long as we can? Instead, the question becomes, How do we love these things in God and in hope of eternal life? How do we keep perspective and better fit ourselves–and our world–for enjoyment of the real, true, and final happiness that is to come?”