{Mortality}

I am starting a series today. I would call it a new series, but that would imply that I have had an old series, which I have not. If you haven't noticed, there hasn't been any series at all on this blog, nor methods to the madness of my posting.

So the decision is final: I am stopping this madness. Or at least I am attempting to. And this comes with the disclaimer that I am still human and I may miss a week from time to time.

What I jot down on my paper during service is usually incoherent, mixed in with a thousand references and quick lines scribbled out that the pastor said which I would do well to remember. Once I get home and look at the mess I've created with my notes, something I've written down usually pops out at me, and pulling out my trusty laptop, I expound on it.

This series is what I end up with after quiet Sunday afternoons of writing. These are short musings from my heart that have made me aware of something in my life, assured me of a promise God has made, or are my own personal re-dedications to live each day like I was dying.

I hope they in some way spur you on to do the same. I know I'm not the first person to say this, but we will always have something to learn, no matter how long we live. I have a life time of revelations still ahead of me.

So welcome to Sunday.

{Mortality}

This life is 100% mortal.

1 out of 1 people will die, and 1 out of 1 people know it. Right now, in the particular season of life we are in, we may not be staring death in the face. But someday we will.

We will face it with our friends. We will face it with those we love and cherish dearest. There will be weeping, and mourning, and sorrow to match no other earthly sorrow.

Many have already begun to face death. Day after day there are funeral processions. There are graveside services. There are half-mast flags. All will, at sometime, walk to the valley of the shadow with someone, and then stand weeping on the shore as the one they love leaves them to go to a place they cannot yet follow.

But the day will arrive we when enter that valley for ourselves. When we become a worldly fatality. When we join the mortality rate as 1 out of 1.

Death, grief, and pain come to everyone.
And everyone chooses, in that moment, how they are going to deal with it.

I was first confronted with death at eight years old, when my Papa died. I didn't really understand what was happening. My innocent mind was acquainted with a weight that it had no clue how to carry.
So I let the weight lie.

I felt the hole of Papa being gone, but I knew that he was in heaven, and so with that sole comfort, I willingly let go of the burden that I couldn't bear.
My simple, childlike faith carried me through. I had the strength I needed for the season of sorrow I faced, and the strength was sufficient.

I wasn't planning on meeting death again. But I don't plan my life. God blessed me with five years of not having to face the valley. Five years of dealing with other things in my life.
And then I was blindsided. One Sunday night in November when I was 13, I learned that the 19 year old son of dear, dear friends had been killed in a car crash.

I was suddenly standing on the brink of eternity, but I couldn't follow. I couldn't go any further than the brink. His grieving family couldn't follow. His best friends couldn't follow.

Where was God? It felt that way at times.
In that hopeless, helpless state, God began to teach me something about death.
He taught me that when I was asking where he was, He was actually right there.

I knew of five young men who were killed that horrific year. My mind suddenly came to the understanding, for the first time, that I lived in a world of death. I lived around death and in death and faced with death. And it wasn't going to go away. Ever.

We live in a deathly world.

But Christ is life.

He is the God of the living, even in the face of death. And when His saints die, they are actually going into true life – so He is still the God of the living.
When we belong to Christ, we need not stand on the brink of death with hopelessness, because we know that the end of the this life is just the beginning of another. Dying, here, allows us to live more truly than we have ever lived before.

I was blessed to know believers who were taken away. I was blessed to learn to grieve with hope, because God doesn't just take us from this world into nothing. He takes us from this world into Glory. He took those believers from pain to painlessness. From danger to safety.

1 out of 1 people will die.

But 1 out of 1 Christians will never feel sorrow again. And there is going to be a huge family reunion in heaven. And that earthly mortality rate,

it won't matter any more.

Because Christ died, so that when he calls us to walk the Valley of the Shadow, we need not fear death. Because as His children, in death, we live.

For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him. Luke 20:38