There is an old saying that has puzzled me for quite some time:

"God gives and takes with equal grace."

At first it feels almost unsettling. We naturally hope that God, or life itself, will only give us what is pleasant and good.

Yet life rarely unfolds that way.

It brings joy and sorrow, gain and loss, beginnings and endings.

Perhaps the old saying is not trying to explain why these things happen.

Perhaps it is simply pointing toward something deeper.

The giver does not cease to be the giver because life also contains hardship.

I do not know whether the saying is true.

But it does make me wonder whether there is a kind of goodness that is deeper than the changing circumstances we encounter along the way.