Someone once told me that people can live for a month without food, a week without water, four minutes without air, but not for one second without hope. From what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of truth to that.

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As people were gathering at the grave, among the members of the media and the other congressmen and dignitaries, I noticed Marcus Rockwell, the founder of Krazle, speaking with the senator.

Because of Jon’s internship with his company, I wasn’t surprised that they knew each other, but I was impressed that Rockwell would come to the funeral, considering all the obligations he had leading an organization that daily served more people than the population of any country on earth.

The service began with the minister reciting a Bible verse about life’s brevity. “Life is a mist,” he said. “James 4:4 tells us, ‘Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’”

Life appears.

And then vanishes away.

Like it did for the young man lying in that casket today.

And he saw it vanish from the bottom of a swimming pool, handcuffed to the chair he used to kill himself.

As I scanned the area, I thought of the minister’s words, and it made me think of a time when I was nine and I went hiking with my dad along Lake Superior’s shoreline in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was early fall, and threads of mist were hanging across the water, lazy and white, tendriling their way onto land, all around us.

I kept reaching out to grab the mist, but I couldn’t quite seem to touch it.

“I want to put it in my pocket,” I told my dad.

“You can’t hold on to mist, Pat. It’s always going to be just out of reach.”

Now, that’s what I remembered. That’s the image I was left with—trying to grasp those ghostlike vapors that floated so tantalizingly close to me but never being able to wrap my fingers around them.

Time wears a bandit’s mask. It is so sly and so quick to steal away our moments, and all too often, the more we try to cling to life, the more we find it slipping right between our fingers.

“Does God even listen to our screams?” the minister asked us in what I took to be a rhetorical question. “How does a loving God remain quiet in the midst of so much pain? How is he silent in reply to the tragic wailing of so many broken hearts, the stinging despair of so many weeping children? He offers such a deafening silence. He is so conspicuously quiet for so long and in so many ways while his people suffer and beg him for relief. How could anyone consider that response to be one of love?”