Chance of a Lifetime

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Remember, each of these ancestors had to live to puberty. For those whose bloodline twines through Europe—and there were like tragedies around the globe—not one of your hundreds of thousands of direct forebears died as a child during the bubonic plague, which mowed down half of Europe with its mighty scythe.

Not only did all our human ancestors survive puberty, but their pre­human ancestors did the same. Then we have to go back further to our premammalian ancestors; and from there to the ur-paramecium; and beyond that to the pinball of planets and stars, playing out their agon into diurnal courses, spinning back through time to the big bang itself.

Mathematically, our death is a simple inevitability, whereas our life hinges on an almost infinite sequence of perfect accidents. The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.

If you find yourself out of the race, so far behind the pack that you can hardly see its dust—if the odds weigh against you, the odds against happiness returning to fill your days with joy, the seemingly overwhelming odds that you will never recover from whatever is beating you down—take a moment to ponder life’s cosmic odds and how you’ve already beaten them.

And then, while you’re blinking in the sun, pause one moment further and remember Silky Sullivan. A valiant stretch run may not make you a winner, but I can promise you this: It will make your heart and the hearts of those who love you beat faster.

Forrest Church’s cancer has returned since he wrote this sermon, and is now considered terminal. Excerpted from Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press; www.beacon.org. This excerpt also ran in Stanford(Nov.-Dec. 2008); www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine.

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