What is life?

I was having a rough night a few days ago, and I thought to myself, "life is hard". Then I got to thinking a little more about that, and concluded that it isn't life that's hard; it's death that's hard. Someone might say that there's this time period between birth and death that most people call "life" and that is in fact difficult. Let me put a different lens on that though. I believe the truth is that life is beautiful and a tremendous blessing, and that death encompasses pretty much all the worst of what we know. You see it's death that's hard; not just when someone passes away, but the death that sneaks into life as subtly as the bad guy in a horror film. 

I think back to the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were told that they could live in complete freedom, allowing them to do just about anything, but were instructed not to eat of the "tree of knowledge" in the middle of the garden. God said if they ate from that tree they would surely die. Picture this. For however many years Adam and Eve were in the garden, walking with God, they were experiencing life. Then they opted to test the meaning of the phrase "you will surely die" by eating the fruit of the tree they were commanded not to. But they didn't die right away, at least not the death that someone in the 21st century would expect. Not too long after they were banished from the garden, chaos broke loose in certain areas of their life, and I can just picture Eve looking at Adam, with thought of the peace in the former garden they lived in, and saying, "Death is hard". You see, Adam and Eve experienced the true form of both life and death. They experienced life before there was death, and they experienced life after there was death, most likely concluding life was better on its own.

I say all this to express the importance of perspective. I cannot say "life is hard" without immediately thinking of the Giver of life, without thinking of the blessings that come with life. Life isn't hard. Life is perfect; it just happens to be flooded with traces of death. Distinguishing what promotes life or death is more  than eating an apple a day or not smoking cigarettes. It requires a knowledge of truth, a knowledge of what will light the way. Most people would say that death is inevitable. Then again, most people don't know the Giver of life. For many, the biblical record of Adam and Eve is simply a story. For me it's a historical picture of life without death. Heaven is a promise of life without death, of light without darkness, and of truth without lies. Heaven isn't only something to strive for. It shines light on what's living and what's dying right now.

This whole thought came while  I was frustrated with circumstances, while sitting in a Sonic pretending I had the self-control not to order Sonic's version of Dairyqueen's Reese's blizzard. I point this out to bring thought back to the reality of now and let you know that I don't believe life is a vague philosophy that will one day prove itself true. Life is truth. The key is a matter of distinguishing what parts of death have sunk in to what we know as life and ridding our minds of thoughts of death. When I was sitting there thinking "life is hard", my mind was overwhelmed with thoughts of death, thoughts of the difficulty of physical pain, thoughts of the hardship of loneliness, of the hopelessness of a lost world. That's when it occurred to me that that's not life. Life is the everything good, and after all, we are living.