A moment of life in death.

The deeps of winter, where I live, are not so deep. Sure, it gets cold, but not so much that you have to worry about permafrost. Even still, the winter is the time that I prune trees that I've planted on our property.
Two of the trees -- a Bradford Pear and a Cleveland Pear -- have grown exponentially over the last few years, and so I've had to work extra hard to keep them at a manageable size.
I kept the 'wands' I cut with the hopes of maybe making something from them, a basket or something.
One of them, a longer one, I cut a small point on and stuck it in the ground by a pile of wood near our fire circle.
A few weeks later, I was surprised to see that there were leaves blooming on tiny branches. I showed my wife who suggested that "life wants to keep living."
I agreed and planted the wand into the good deep wet earth in our yard.
I was speaking to a friend who knows plants, and he said that, if I want the wand to develop roots, I'd need to prune the new leaves. My hope was that if I ignored the leaves, the wand would still develop roots. Nature might find a way.
As I walked out this morning to look at the thing, I felt the same affection for it that I do the others I've planted. I would be hard for me to pluck the leaves. But rationality kicked in and I knew if I wanted it to live, it was a sacrifice I'd need to make. There wouldn't be any magic involved.

Life is often like this. We want something, and we know that to get it, we have to make sacrifices. Despite this, we often delude ourselves into thinking that something or someone unseen will intervene. My hope with the tree, that it would survive either way, was not a bad hope, but it was uninformed.
I know what I'd like, and I know what will be. The choice I have to make is whether I will allow my wants to cloud the reason. Or if I will trust to the  reality of the situation and make a rational decision.

We can hope and wait on an eternal unseen presence to intervene, or we can act on what we know.
It won't always be life or death. But, realizing that we have within ourselves the power to act, even in the face of what we know is inevitable may just be for us a moment of life in death.