Thoughts for January 27, 2016

            This devotion also has nothing to do with last weekend’s sermon, either.

            Monday night, I officiated the funeral of a man who was by every measure too young to die. Yesterday morning, I was summoned to a family who just that morning endured a sudden and catastrophic loss. One of the most pivotal moments of my life was the sudden loss of my father: in the morning he was there; in the afternoon he wasn’t.

            Some thoughts: first, this is why we believe. We throw ourselves on the grace of God manifest in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection precisely for moments such as this. Some folks, faced with catastrophe, find their faith shaken. “How could God…?” they ask. That seems to me precisely backwards. When life is hard, when sin and its terrible consequences rear their ugly heads, we ought to exclaim, “How terrible is brokenness that humans have inflicted on God’s world!” That places the blame where it appropriately belongs. And, along with that, we ought to exclaim, “Thanks be to God that He delivers us” (Rom. 7:25)! For it is our God who saves and promises a life after death.

            Second, it pays to treat life as a precious gift and to be reconciled to those we are in conflict with. St. Paul says that love “keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Cor. 13:5), and he urges us to be reconciled to each other (cf. Col. 3:13). Sometimes, we just don’t feel the urgency of that. We’re angry; we’re hurt; we’re in no rush to see things restored and set right. Sometimes, it’s just plain old pride: “He hurt me; I can wait until he realizes his mistake…” At least two things are wrong with such thinking. First, such bitterness only makes us sick. Holding a grudge, refusing to forgive, putting off possible reconciliation—that’s spiritually damaging. It makes us hard. (God says that he will replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh [Ez. 11:19]; how dare we than replace a heart of flesh with a heart of stone?) Second, it imagines that we have all the time in the world, and sometimes that just not the case. I can’t tell you the number of regrets I’ve heard expressed because someone didn’t say what needed to be said before it was too late.

            Life can be short. It’s good to think on that, to build a faith that prepares us for an uncertain future, and to keep our accounts paid. It’s good to live each day in the expectation that eternity is near.