Is life a prison sentence, or is it a gift from God?

So many of the things we do in life are crippling and diabilitating. We trudge to work and back, barely conscious, longing for meaning and purpose and significance, our souls crying for relief.

We are worn down by the weight of the world, by injustice, indifference, oppression… the unseen forces that manipulate the controls and mechanisms of the system in whose gears we find ourselves stuck in.

Christian or not, we are faced with the unnerving reality of running like hamsters in a flawed system, our survival based on mundane, routine tasks with all too infrequent glimpses of glory and the world outside the cage.

Our questions are many. Our triumphs overshadowed by our defeats. Our failures hang over our heads like the carcasses of animals led to slaughter.

What is our destiny? What is our inheritance?

Is this life meant to prepare us for the next by engaging in battles we cannot win, by living lives we can never fully understand?

Are we puppets?

Is our puppet master a kindly soul, who delights not in our eventual demise nor the slow, agonizing process that leads to the twlight of our lives?

Is it only in death that we can find peace?

Where is the peace here and now, in the midst of crushing defeat, of the numbing senselessness of our day to day existence?

But in you I hope, Oh Lord.
In you I put my trust, as one who trusts engineers that have designed bridges over great chasms.
You sustain. You breathe life into lifeless situations.
And you give us glimpses of the eternal, of the unmatchable beauty of the world you know, a world without suffering, pain and injustice.
A world which will melt away the scars of the lives we live now.