Thank you for your thoughts and prayers

Baby Luke passed away last night. It's easy enough to say that life would always have been difficult. But life is a blessing and a gift, and it's hard to let it go in ourselves and in the people we love. Especially the very little people who we don't get to keep with us for long.

He was born on the same day as the Virginia Tech shootings. Maybe this sorrow isn't played out on the national stage, but this hits much closer to home for me and my family.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.... ~ John Donne

What though the sea with waues continuall
Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all:
Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought,
For whatsoeuer from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide vnto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought. ~ Edmund Spenser

John Donne got it wrong, or was at least looking at it too narrowly. We are not diminished, but we are transformed. There's hope in that, if I can accept the change with grace. But it's hard, and it does feel more like loss right now.