"Death is Life's Best Invention" - Steve Jobs

Hard times may not be "the best of times," (cf. the devotional on Ecclesiastes 3) but they can, by God's grace, be "the time when we make our most important decisions." Pairing a passage from the Hebrew Bible with Jesus' famous "Beatitudes" on the Sermon on the Mount, Fr. Allen wrestles with the counter-intuitive logic that when we face our inevitable demise we can truly start living.