Perfect Life Perfect Death A Book of Hope

By Richard G. Starshak

Everything centers on life and death. Not one moment arises where we are not in life, or pondering about what happens at death. One leads to the other. One stems from the prior. Both, taken together, teaches us what “hope” really is. Join Rich as he brings all of life’s principles together as he presents “hope” in a whole new way … through the penetrating eyes of both life and death and what it means to see both standing before us!

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385012060

Richard G. Starshak

Although operating a family garden center by trade, Rich has his passions in reaching out and being active in his local community. His involvement includes youth outings, basketball outreaches, coffee houses, music groups, and neighborhood improvements. At their family garden center, they offer visitors a colorful walk through their nearly one acre display gardens, as well as providing free landscape designs to anyone, design workshops, and kid’s activities daily as part of their community outreach. Rich has also published “Perfect Design Using Math and Geometry to Build Great Landscape Designs!” which brings a whole new way to look at visual design!

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Copyright © 2023 Richard G. Starshak.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1205-3 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1206-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023921810

WestBow Press rev. date: 11/21/2023

Contents

IWhat is Life?

Human Life…More Than Just Existing?

IIWhat is Death?

IIIWhat is Perfect?

Our Perception of Perfect

A Look at Passion and Drive

IVWhat About Me?

Identity

Purpose

Goals

Our Role in Life

Our Best/Our Attitude

Perspective

VPriorities

VIWhat Does Death Really Change?

1. A Point (An Ending)

2. A Process (An Assessment)

3. A Picture (A hope)

VIIPerspective

Obtaining a Good Perspective

VIIIBeyond Death

Time

Seasons

Sleep

Beforehand

We Can Be Confident In Knowing What To Do!

Our Own Standard

Faith and Trust

Love and Compassion

Good Works

Humility

Mercy

Forgiveness

IXIs Life Fair?

Sorrow and Pain

Doing Good

XHope Affirmed!

We Are Born To Have Purpose!

XIThe Irony of Life

XIIValue

References

I

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What is Life?

L ife. We used to just see something and know whether it was living, dead, or it was never part of the living. We see the obvious in plants, animals, and humans and sense the teeming of smaller parts of such life in the cells and the worlds in which they thrive, multiply, and go to work each day. As modern thinking entered into the equation, we now debate it more than ever before as to what is life, or non-life, and have developed numerous definitions, concepts, and conscripts as to evaluate, even vote on, what constitutes life.

As children, we were simply awestruck by the sight of plants, veggies, flowers, pets, and the diversity of people bounding around us. As age crept in, we seem to have relegated awestruck and replaced it with definitions. Considering what was seen as living might have been relegated back a bit too, as we debate what exactly is this thing called living anyways?

Is the thing existing and set before us a self-contained chemical process? Can it actually reproduce itself, by itself, or one with itself? Is there a self-sustaining biological process within it? Is it growing? Can it react to stimulus? Is there a mobility that it possesses within its existence? We probably thought we pretty much knew what life was until we met up with the theory of life, or the concept of life, or the definition of life along the way. Present insights seem to swing in the direction of today’s more elongated technical analysis. Does something meet the exact specifications? How much of the checklist must it meet? A virus seems to be alive, but not independent of a host. Nor does a parasite. They appear to hold to the form of life, but not actually be life.

Life can be described as the time between birth and death. We all seem to well comprehend and agree that the living things among us have a beginning and an end. Whether it sprouts, hatches, incubates, or is born, it begins its life. It has a closely pre-calculated maximum amount of time to exist, and it then comes to its end. There simply is no more. And the thing we call life, we might also call age. This is a measure of life, at least by quantity, and not necessarily an all-inclusive measure of quality. We are quite aware of this entire process. We can see something living and approximate its age, and we are quite aware that we too are a part of this quite evident and thought-productive process.

This easily brings us to identity, thus moving forward beyond the microscopic and plant worlds. Each animal is also unique and different, but do they possess an identity? Evidently they can see, hear, move, gather, store, communicate, and reproduce. They can see the adversarial animal threat approaching. They sense danger. They protect and care for the group or herd. They can identify their mate, and some can recognize their keeper and caretaker. They seem to have something of an identity. They are conceptually living.

They appear to meet clearly the definition of life and even bridge into a sense of purpose. They embrace life. Their time being alive is spent hunting, gathering, eating, resting, and yes, making more of themselves. Each day reveals one form or another of a purposeful set of activities as they, or any life, nurtures themselves in order to sustain their own lives. At some point they reproduce to sustain new life. We may never fully understand how they just know what to do, nonetheless, they know what to do according to its own nature, brain, instincts, and senses. So maybe we might think that life is connected to that which has purpose?

But hold on! What of that which has the ability to move, direct, work, and reproduce, but not nearly be what we would consider to be living? Along comes this thing called DNA, a non-living piece imbedded into the process of life. It is not a living part of it. Yet, life does not exist without it. It has no self-identity. It has no brain. And yet DNA, most pronouncedly and most obviously, instructs, guides, directs, and determines the building blocks of incredibly complex pieces of life, as proteins. DNA moves, provides instructions, works, and it too reproduces. Its purpose seems to be to build a life form of another (protein), but does it also comprehend that the proteins are not the end product? Does DNA possess intelligence? Does DNA comprehend that this particular protein, the one that it is guiding in its construction, will then build yet another ever more complex unit in the chain of the differentials in life?

How can the non-living act like the living? And why? And how can that which has no life, direct the building blocks of the things we call life, determining our unique genetic codes and providing the overwhelming complex set of instructions to produce molecules in our own bodies? It ends, but doesn’t die, because it is not alive. Its time just ceases.

This complexity of definitions surfaces so often in our language. We make a living, live life fully, are the life of the party, recognize the life of a battery, and commit our life to a cause. Some give their life away to a personal cause, or to a sacred work of a ministry, either by sensing that life is limited and there is only so much time we have (that there is something beyond what we see as life here and now) or by recognizing the value of life and what we do with it.

Human Life…More Than Just Existing?

Who has not come face to face with a time, age, and a sense of how much of this thing we call my life we have left? I remember as a youngster being well aware of my age. I knew that I was not yet in the double digits. I was only in the single digits. Ten was a big event to come up against. I was happy to not be that age yet. I was still young. Following ten, there are the next age breaks of fifteen, sweet-sixteen (to drive), eighteen (to vote), twenty (two decades), twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty, and on it goes.

When I took my first job out of college, I clearly remember being younger. So many others at my workplace were a good deal older. I felt comfort in that. I was just twenty-four. Thirty was still a bit far away. But I did seem to be a real adult now.

Some years later I was at a business meeting when they flashed a congratulations message aimed at a colleague stating Lordy, Lordy, look who’s 40! It made me think how glad that it wasn’t me. I was then just thirty-two. When we attended a birthday party for a friend turning fifty, it was both happy and unsettling. How could we actually have friends (not a parent, aunt, or uncle) that was fifty? We were in our early forties.

Life and age were walking hand-in-hand with each other. Wherever we went, and however long we went, there they were…at birthdays, graduations, weddings, jobs and careers, house moves, kids and grandkids. As grandparents we begin to relive our younger moments and reminisce about younger days and ages. Life becomes more contemplating, reflecting, and spiritual perhaps. We become more cognizant of the end of life simply because we no longer look forward to it. We’ve arrived. We no longer anticipate the teens, adulthood, kids, and careers. All these things were already done.

As the future shortens up, so does our perspective of life, its meanings, and its brevity. Have I lived the good life? Did I make a difference? Did I fulfill a purpose? Not only are we looking back upon the time of being alive, we now better understand that the moment of not living anymore is approaching, however slowly day-by-day. These end-of-life contemplating moments can certainly ingest a sense of weighing the value of all we have said and done. Maybe the end (certainty) justifies our self-reflection and self-judgment of the life we chose (uncertainty) to lead.

Maybe possessing the wisdom of life is more elusive than we think, for who holds each moment of each day in such high esteem as to be able to insert maximum value into each breath we take? There are indeed those who may live to die, as with depression, anguish, helplessness or hopelessness, loneliness, or simply aging. Physical deterioration can add to the visual reality of a limited lifespan. A lack of purpose erases the thirst for existence. However, there are those filled with purpose, even if short-ranged, temporary, and even self-focused, yet exemplify what life should look like to the average on-looker at that time.

Somewhere in the dialogue in our minds, and at choice moments with close friends, there begs the question of How is life as I know it fulfilled, effected, or perfected? What combination of cognizant, relevant, and perhaps spiritual reflection and examination will yield that ah-ha moment when we get it? When can we simply and unemotionally lay out the reasonable explanation of what true life and living is all about?

Do we really want to wait to the end of life,

to understand the extent of life?

Is not human life sealed into our minds somehow, that this life is obviously more than a purely physical and temporary time of existence? Is