Every segment of life is both gift and challenge, both endowment and responsibility. It is the warp and woof of the fabric we call time. The delicate interplay between the two has the power to rock us back and forth between total confidence and abject despair. We lurch through life between doubt and faith, between security and cloying uncertainty, between the enrichment that comes from differences and the divisions that come from fear. It is learning to cling to a sense of alleluia for both that carries us through life to that moment when everything in us has come to fullness and our only next step is immersion in God.