Don’t waste your precious time on earth

Here’s a personal observation: each of us is perpetually at odds with fate.

Furthermore, afflictions assail us at the most inopportune times.

“Why is this happening to me?” I demand of providence, of persons within my sphere of influence and of myself –- as if a transformative answer is to be found in a fortune cookie.

Sorry. Age and affliction teach me that facile answers in this mystifying universe are a fantasy.

“Does any of this make sense?” I ask no one in particular.

Why do the vagaries of chance and peril haunt my broken existence? Life is hard.

Susan, in C.S. Lewis’ fantasy novel series, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” asks Mrs. Beaver if Aslan, the Great Lion, is “safe.” Aslan is Lewis’ Christ-figure.

“Safe?” responds Mrs. Beaver. “‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King.”

Nowhere that I venture this side of eternity is safe. Danger lurks everywhere. But the great creator and sustainer of all things is good. That I know.

The other day, an impaired driver at a major university’s homecoming parade plowed a car into a crowd and killed four unsuspecting people. Fifty others were hurt. Explain that, if you can. I can’t.

Who could have anticipated such a horrible tragedy? Do you suppose anyone in that community awoke Saturday morning dreading the looming carnage? Not likely.

We wander these earthly precincts clueless.

Newlyweds mysteriously tumble from cruise ships; babies die transiting the birth canal; and women in the prime of life fall to the ravages of breast cancer. And we assume we’ll live to be 100.

With regularity our lives are interrupted, impeded and interdicted, sans our approval. Generally, we don’t tender tragedy an invitation to abide with us. But, it comes without our bidding, and we have no say whatsoever.

I know one who is good, however.

The other day I visited a mentor who resides in a care facility. Confined to a wheelchair, his sole diversion is to manage the 60-inch flat screen on his wall. He does so with a firm grip on his TV remote.

The marvels of modern technology.

Once a gifted writer and entrepreneur, my mentor now depends upon a caregiver to assist him in going to the bathroom, boiling an egg and tying his shoes.

My friend eerily lives a modern version of what former president and Union Army general, Ulysses S. Grant, experienced 130 years ago.

Grant’s assistant, Gen. Adam Badeau, recorded his observations: “He often sat for hours propped up in his chair, with his hands clasped, looking at the blank wall before him, silent, contemplating the future; not alarmed, but solemn at the prospect of pain and disease, and only death at the end.”

I know not what my friend contemplates. Petty reality shows and insignificant ballgames dance across the pixels of his flat screen, day and night. We risk squandering our final moments. In place of Grant’s blank wall and deep reflections my friend has an LCD that dispenses drivel. This is no time for mind-numbing distractions.

With my friend’s TV being the exception, things haven’t changed much in 130 years. Our souls still yearn for one who can liberate us from our despair.

Life assaults me at every turn. My aspirations wither. Where is hope when I most need it?

Take time to listen for echoes of divine intercession. They’re there. Our dispirited souls thirst for the music of majesty and intelligence that went into the creation of spinning planets, exploding supernovas and whirling galaxies. It’s there.

“Might our true origins and destiny somehow lie beyond (the) stars?” asks Oxford professor Alister McGrath. “Might there not be a homeland from which we are presently exiled and to which we secretly long to return? Might not our accumulation of discontentment and disillusionment with our present existence be a pointer to another land where our true destiny lies and which is able to make its presence felt now in this haunting way?”

A thought worth mulling.

Don’t dismiss it too quickly.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.