PHOTO: A "friend" to so many. The content on "Death" this week is a coincidence.
One thing in life is almost certain. That good friend or relative you are with today… one of you will be at the other’s funeral.
There are lots of ways we can react. To stop making friends would be the surest way to avoid such sorrow.
Or…do a pinky shake and simultaneously say, “See you there!” Then finish your beer. Or switch it up to Champagne.
The manner we handle grieving at the end of a life could tell us something of how we are living our life. I don’t want to go skydiving or ride a bull name “Fu Manchu.” But I would dive in like Clarence-the-angel to save a drowning and discouraged spirit.
Funerals are the in-your-face interrogator: “What are you doing with the relationships in your life now?” and “What are the potential relationships that you could be developing for eternal purposes?”
It’s so strange that we survey stock results (if we’re lucky enough to have any), check out the stats of our favorite players, stay up on fictional TV series characters, follow the politician of our choice and even willingly or unwittingly allow gossip about friends and acquaintances to get catalogued in the files of our brain. Do we have that zeal and put that effort into keeping abreast of someone who we may some day see in a casket?
Management 101 calls for looking at the end results and working backwards to achieve that goal. Funerals 101 arrest us with thoughts of how we want to say “Goodbye” and start working toward that end beginning today.
PORTAL TO HEAVEN: God allows sorrow for repentance, not regret. To go to every funeral for the rest of my life and be at total peace with myself and the deceased would be a “See-you-there” portal to heaven.
If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men…Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another…For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death.
Romans 12:18,9 NKJV Corinthians 7:10 NKJV