The Concept of life - by David Lilly-West

Life feels like a ninety-minute football match with no extra time, no penalties, no do-overs. Just one final whistle. You either win or you lose, and the hardest part is that life doesn’t play fair the way a game does. In football you can predict who might score, who might dominate, how the match might unfold. But life—life is wild, unpredictable, and unforgiving. You don’t know when joy will arrive or when death will interrupt the story. You don’t know how many times you’ll fail before you rise, or whether the dreams you carry will ever make it out of your chest and into reality. We make plans like drafts waiting for approval, but in the end, only God knows which ones will live and which ones will fade. We work, we laugh, we cry, we break, we hope. Sometimes we get so overwhelmed by pain and disappointment that even breathing feels like labor. Some people collapse under the weight of it all, unable to hold the world any longer. And even for those who keep pushing, life has a way of cutting deep. You can spend your whole existence trying to build something meaningful, only to be taken away before you ever see the fruit of your suffering. A family can pray and hope for a child, finally receive the blessing they longed for, and in the same breath lose someone they thought they’d grow old with. Joy and tragedy walk hand in hand, and life never warns you which one is waiting around the corner. What makes it harder is how easy it is to lose everything. Life is hard to live but frighteningly easy to lose. One step outside the house doesn’t guarantee a return. People leave their homes every day and never make it back—caught in accidents, violence, or tragedies they never saw coming. And in places torn by conflict, like parts of Nigeria where Christians have been attacked, kidnapped, and killed simply for existing in the wrong place at the wrong time, life becomes a battlefield where innocence offers no protection. Families vanish. Worshippers never return from church. Whole communities live with the fear that today might be their last ordinary day. It’s a reminder of how fragile breath is, how cheaply death takes what we hold dear. Life can be so good—so overflowing with light, laughter, and purpose—and then, with one moment, one phone call, one scream in the night, it can all disappear. Everything you love can be gone before you can even understand what happened. That’s the cruelty and the mystery of life: how something so precious can be so unbearably fragile. And still, we wake up. Still, we hope. Still, we walk out the door even though we know the world is unpredictable. Maybe that’s what makes life powerful—the courage to live even when nothing is guaranteed. The strength to keep going even when pain sits heavy on the heart. The faith that somehow, in all this disorder and sorrow, God still sees, still knows, still holds everything together even when it feels like it’s all falling apart. Life doesn’t promise safety, fairness, or clarity. But it does give us moments—fleeting, fragile moments—to love, to fight, to believe. And maybe that’s all we can do: live fully, cry honestly, hope stubbornly, and trust God fiercely, because the whistle will blow someday, and none of us knows when.

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