We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.

From somewhere off in the distance, a loon called into the ascending night. And drifting across the lake’s sleepy surface, it’s call lent both a stirring mystery and a gentle magic to the lake and the now drowsy forest that surrounded it. And I remember thinking that no song I have ever heard in the entirety of my life ever conveyed so much with so little.

The songs of the birds are the ballad of the forest. And while we still might have the forest without the songs, we would have lost the story. Therefore, at the point that we lose our song we have likewise lost our story.

What is ‘life,’ we ask?” The answer is quite simple. It is whatever’s left over after we’ve extracted the meddling of men.

What's the purpose in all of this if there's not a purpose in all of this?

If sacrifice is not the theme of my life, there’s no sense telling the story.

By far, an ending is the most direct path to a beginning.

To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story.

Deep in the voice of a child and laced throughout the melody of their laughter we can hear what life was like before ‘innocence stolen’ swept it away. And if we bend down and listen closely, we suddenly realize that life was never stolen. Rather, we gave it away.