"Linked........................."

The heat being what it was, Beth waited in the car while I circled the cemetery hillside looking for the scattered gravesites of my family. Each one, once re-discovered, always affects me in the same manner. I speak to the deceased, some deep inner connection bringing tears to my eyes, words of just how much they meant to me. Sadly, such bond between us was never so openly expressed, life simply occurring until one day dialogue was reduced to this… I watched “The Vow” with my wife Monday afternoon, a true story about a young married couple, he barely injured in an automobile accident, she suffering serious head trauma, surviving, but with no memory of anything other than those years prior to encountering him. At one point, his thoughts reveal a theology of how each of us are the sum total of every moment that we’ve ever experienced with all the people that we’ve ever known, such history shaping us along the way; “but,” he asks, “what happens if, somewhere in the journey, we no longer remember anything? Having just turned seventy last October and continually finding myself, more and more, going mentally blank on one thing or another, it is a question I can well appreciate. While our brain most certainly plays a vital role in our existence, though, is it my entire identity to the extent that, once it perishes or simply loses its potential, I’m no longer “there”? Or is it merely a computer given me while I’m “here”, the real “me” an eternal spark lit by a Creator unto whom it must return? And, if so, shouldn’t that somehow tie all of us together in a common bond stronger than the ways we manage to separate ourselves from each other?.........