Would you live forever?

Nope.

What reason would there be to risk, and therefore live, if you could live forever? Life is lived most vibrantly when we are at peace with God, when we push beyond our fears, and when we find meaningful relationships. Living forever would give us ample reason not to push beyond our fears, because there would be no limit to the time we have to conquer them; and finding meaningful relationships would have us meet our loved ones' deaths again and again, enough that we might even long for our own.

In the end, I believe I (and you, if you want) will live forever here on Earth anyway, but not in the manner we experience today. It will be one where neither the fears we want to conquer nor the relationships we fear losing will matter as they do today, because they will each in turn be cast aside (fears) or found the more meaningful (relationships) when we turn again to the first-- and most important-- reason for life: peace with God.* It is this purpose that will burn brighter than the others, when we see the purity and magnificence of a God whose subtle shadow will become before us a resplendence we cannot now fathom.

*I can't say what kinds of relationships we'll have, but I think that whatever we do have will be better than they are today.

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Heroes

Although we have several examples of heroes in our day, one of the best known is of a woman named Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (“Gonja Bojaju”), who devoted her life to sustaining the “poor, sick, orphaned, and dying.” Her venue was Calcutta, India, where she served as a teacher until she began to take notice of the poverty there. Seeking to do something about it, she began an organization that consisted of just thirteen members at its inception. Called the “Missionaries of Charity,” the organization would eventually burgeon into well over 5,000 members worldwide, running approximately 600 missions, schools and shelters in 120 countries; and caring for the orphaned, blind, aged, disabled, and poor. As her personal work expanded, she traveled to countries like Lebanon, where she rescued 37 children from a hospital by pressing for peace between Israel and Palestine; to Ethiopia, where she traveled to help the hungry; to Chernobyl, Russia, to assist victims of the nuclear meltdown there; and to ...

The Nice Guy Fallacy

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Comparative Medical Care

One thing I'd like to understand is why there is such a difference between medical costs here and those in Haiti. At the time the book Mountains Beyond Mountains was written, in 2003, it often cost $15,000 to $20,000 annually to treat a patient with tuberculosis, while it cost one one-hundredth of that-- $150 to $200-- to treat a patient for the disease in Haiti. Even if the figures aren't completely accurate, the sheer difference would still be there. Indeed, the United States pays more per capita for medical care than any other country on Earth. My first guess for why the disparity exists is that there is a market willing and able to pay more for medical treatment, so suppliers see the demand and respond with higher prices. According to at least one doctor (go to http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2009/05/what_is_the_cause_of_excess_co.php), part of the reason is administrative prices here. People here have a higher standard of living, and so the cost of care is shifted to ...

Thoughts

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