The terrifying dilemma of humankind is to be aware of the magnificent gifts of our unique consciousness, which allows us to live a heightened state of existence while contemporaneously bedeviled with the knowledge that we must die.

Humankind’s pathetic life supplies the poetry of our existence. Just as without tragedy comedy would lose its magical qualities, life without pain and absent knowledge of the inevitability of our death would result in our brief existence devoid of any note of sincerity and our lives ending without an apt punctuation mark.

Our reward for surviving the hard knocks of a corporal life is arguably paltry. The inevitability of the big sleep is our final reward for laying it all on the line each day that we still breathe. A person whom elects to transform him or herself does so because they believe that life is worthwhile. If a troubled person mints a newly reconstituted persona, it might enable them serenely to accept everything life calls for, even struggle, loss, defeat, disintegration, and death.

The impeccable watchmaker geared the noble self to suffer. The ineluctable part of being human is perpetual sorrow, grief, and misery. Suffering is part of living. Life begins joyously and regretfully ends in tragedy. The cold realities of the world triumphantly crush each one of us. Between birth and death is comedic conjugation, the haunting prelude to the end of the self.

As far as we are concerned we do not wish to stand in anyone’s way, nor do we wish to bring discredit on the ministry God has given us. Indeed we want to prove ourselves genuine ministers of God whatever we have to go through—patient endurance of troubles or even disasters, being flogged or imprisoned; being mobbed, having to work like slaves, having to go without food or sleep. All this we want to meet with sincerity, with insight and patience; by sheer kindness and the Holy Spirit; with genuine love, speaking the plain truth, and living by the power of God. Our sole defence, our only weapon, is a life of integrity, whether we meet honour or dishonour, praise or blame. Called “impostors” we must be true, called “nobodies” we must be in the public eye. Never far from death, yet here we are alive, always “going through it” yet never “going under”. We know sorrow, yet our joy is inextinguishable. We have “nothing to bless ourselves with” yet we bless many others with true riches. We are penniless, and yet in reality we have everything worth having.

We cannot have it all. We must live with our limitations. We cannot hold onto life with higher esteem than it deserves. We live only once, a life best served by dedicating ourselves to reducing the suffering of others, not inflicting evilness, taking satisfaction in just being, and recognizing the glory of nature.