Too many (in my count) friends have died over the last few weeks.
Covid, sudden, miscarriage, etc.
First Corinthians 15.55:
“O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”
The death of Christians causes us to grieve, but not as those without hope grieve. Though our minds know our loved one is with Jesus; our heart is crushed.
I don’t know, nor need to know, the process of a Christian’s death…I’ll experience it soon enough. “Absent from the body, present with the Lord” (2 Cor 5.8) is good and clear enough for me.
How that transition happens; what, exactly, is it to be present with the Lord is beyond my understanding.
But I try not to let what I don’t know mess up what I do know.
A friend passed away from COVID this afternoon. While praying for his widow and other family I remembered today is also his physical birthday. The Puritan Alexander Grosse wrote,
“For the day of death to the body is, as one saith, the birthday of eternity to the soul.”
For the believer death has no victory, and the sting of death, though painful, is countered by “blessed assurance.”
Usually on Tuesdays I post a “Throwback Tune.”
Only this seems appropriate today: