How “Precious” Is Life?

FRI., NOV. 15, 1996, 6:50 AM
FARM, STUDY

The more accurate, but longer, title would be How “Precious” is bodily earth life? Spiritual life is continuous, once it commences (though there may be some “times” like unto sleep). Bodily earth life is a special manifestation that can be quite special, but also can be rather short and can involve some pain and trauma.

Thus, I can say that bodily earth life is “precious” because it has an ending, and who you were, is no more. Therefore you should savor and appreciate each moment and each event in such a life. A fair analogy is a day that is beautiful in all ways, full of activities that are fun, rewarding, and, just wonderful. You don’t want it to end, but it does, no matter how you try to prolong it and its pleasures. Night comes, and with it sleep and the end of that day. Then there are ugly days, with frustrations, pain, and problems galore. Is such an equally precious day? Do you savor it to its very end, or would you hasten its close, if you could?

My best answer to My question, in the title, is that life is both “precious” and quite “ordinary”. I tell you, what I don’t tell most Christians, that the life you’re living now is precious in its potential for growth of spirit, but it’s not “all you have”. It can be more motivating to see this as your only chance… like one strike and you’re out… of glory and into eternal suffering.

So if life, as the potential for growth, continues, with more chances, then it becomes less “precious” and more “ordinary” (or that’s just the way it is). Just as going to sleep at the end of a problem-filled day doesn’t solve all of those problems, so dying, bodily, doesn’t “settle” the conditions of the life just lived. But the other side is that going to sleep at the end of a fine, productive, joyful day can be a deserved rest, with the next day enriched by the actions of the previous one. Yes, in this sense, the rich can, and should, get richer.

Live is “precious” in the way you live it… in the opportunities for loving service that you accept and create. Also it is precious as an experience in which you can perceive beyond the boundaries of your culture’s ways of thinking, using “time” here to contemplate the realities that continue on beyond bodily death. Whatever you do, in this last portion of your life, do it with joy and with appreciation. Be more accepting, and less determined to accomplish and to “change things”. For everything there is a season…

(7:32 / 10:02)

The more there is of anything the less “precious” it seems to be. In some parts of your land people have been dealing with several feet of snow, and this natural return of moisture to the earth seems less precious to many who must live and work in its “presence.” Human life is My most elaborate single creation, but it is not as important as the whole web of life, of which it is a part. You know, from many of My teachings to you, that the increase in human life must be diminished, and finally halted. Human willingness to “work with Me” on this will be helpful and appreciated, but deaths must also increase.

It was headline news yesterday that deaths from cancer, in your culture, now show a trend toward diminishing. This was perceived as good news, even as one of My truly good Catholic servants succumbed to this reaction by his body. Just as I am allowing you humans to pollute “your” environment in ways that encourage cancer, so I allow cancer as a consequence, for some of you. I also allow some successful medical treatments, but the processes of their development will cause more deaths than they prevent… or, really, postpone.