Although I read N. D. Wilson’s Death by Living back in 2017, I have regularly visited certain passages and chapters ever since. The following is one such quotation:

Our futile struggle in time is courtesy of God’s excessive giving. Sunset after sunset make it hard to remember and hold just one. Smell after smell. Laugh after laugh. A mind still thinking, a heart still beating. Imagine sticking your fingers on your pulse and thanking God every time He gave you another blood-driving, brain-powering thump. We should. And we shouldn’t, because if we did, we would never do anything else with our living; we wouldn’t have the time to look at or savor any of the other of our impossibillions of gifts.

My wife and I tend to overgift to our kids at Christmas. We laugh and feel foolish when a kid is so distracted with one toy that we must force them into opening the next, or when something grand goes completely unnoticed in a corner. How consumerist, right? How crassly American.

How like God.

We are all that overwhelmed kid, not even noticing our heartbeats, not even noticing our breathing, not even noticing that our fingertips can feel and pick things up, that pie smells like pie and that our hangnails heal and that honey-crisp apples are real and that dogs wag their tails and that awe perpetually awaits us in the sky. The real yearning, the solomonic state of mind, is caused by too much gift, by too many things to love in too short a time. Because the more we are given, the more we feel the loss as we are all made poor and sent back to our dust.

Oh, but we notice heartbeats when they stop. And we beg for more. If we are capable of sulking about Christmas while still around the tree half-buried in shiny paper (and we are), then of course we are capable of weeping when Christmas appears to be over. The ungrateful always farm bitterness in their hearts. Those with faith (yet another gift) rejoice even at the end and after. They wipe tears, more profoundly feeling the full wealth of lives given when those same lives are lost.[1]

I think this passage resurfaced in my mind for two reasons. First, Wilson mentions Christmas, which is only a couple of days away. Second, while my specific gift-giving philosophy of Christmas is the exact opposite of Wilson’s, I whole-heartedly agree with his overall point. My wife and I do, indeed, like to over-gift our daughters (on every day except Christmas). In fact, after several packages arrived for a few consecutive weeks on Tuesday, we now have a family joke of giving Happy Tuesday gifts. It truly is a joy to give because the Creator of the cosmos is Himself the great Giver and giving imitates Him. May we remember that joy anew this Christmas.

[1] Wilson, N. D.. Death by Living (pp. 107-109). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.