A HUNDRED and eighty pair of eyes, some red with tears, gaze in my direction. Some of them actually register me, but not many. Most are glazed; open but with brains busy elsewhere.

They've just been told that one of their number, in the first year of secondary school, is no more.

Unbelievably, the handsome, strapping prop-forward-in-the-making scarcely into his teens has inexplicably died hours before.

And now, in an impromptu school assembly, they feel loss, perhaps for the first time. They taste fear and vulnerability 'it could have been me!' The tragic fragility of life, even in our sophisticated century, suddenly seems pointless, haphazard; something to rage against.

And then we start to pray, and the point of it all gradually seeps back.

We're a Christian school, and detect God in the middle of it all.

We haven't the faintest idea what he's doing; not with the loss of such youth.

Yet we recollect his loving ways of old. There was Good Friday last month, and suddenly we know this lad's not lost, but deeply loved.

God in Christ spread wide his arms on a cross to save him, and us.

Then, he broke back through death to offer eternal life to all who love him.

Now, we remember once again we're pilgrims in this life en route to a greater land and life that's out of this world!

The best is yet to be.