The Stage of History

“If we lived forever, life itself would have no shape, no edge, no urgency, no compelling purpose. We would not act. For anything we wished to do, there would always be time in the future. We would leave our children, and be left by our parents, no space to be ourselves, to write our own chapter in the human story. The very fact of our mortality means that we have our moment on the stage of history, when everything depends on us.”

Covenant and Conversation: Deuteronomy, p. 376