God’s gifts aren’t the problem, of course. He gives good gifts to his children (Ps 84:11, 34:10, 103:5). Our problem is the weight we misattribute to these gifts. We want them to be and to bear too much. When we hoist a crane on the back of a horse, we shouldn’t expect any galloping around the pasture.

The signs of her are everywhere. From inspirational sayings on the fridge to masking-tape labels on spice jar lids, we see her handwriting all over the kitchen. No matter how much sorting and donating we’ve done, she’s still a huge part of that house.

Rightly so. My parents were married for almost 50 years, spending close to 45 years in that house. Mom has been gone since the fall of 2023, but I can still smell her distinctive scent when I walk in the front door.

I spent some time with my dad this past February, and I felt those now-familiar feelings that I know accompany loss and grief: sadness at my mom’s absence and gratitude for the time I had with her. That time was not short—I am not young!—but good relationships rarely last as long as we’d like. We’re finite, but we crave the infinite.

We don’t raise the topic much in conversations at work or at the coffee shop, but our death is inevitable.1 Famously, this is the great equalizer, the one experience (aside from birth) all humans will share.2 Here’s one among many obvious implications: all of God’s gifts are temporary.

It’s easy to acknowledge the temporary nature of some gifts—an ice cream cone, a garden bloom in the spring, a favorite band’s concert. We know we can’t hold onto these for long.

But we treat some other gifts differently.

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