Reflections on Ends
Growing up in a Pastor’s home, then being in Pastoral Ministry
for some 30 years, I have seen and been a part of many funerals. Many of them were acquaintances, some were close
friends, some were strangers, some long time coworkers and teammates.
Some of those funerals were for people who I had no idea if
their future held a hope for heaven.
Some were for people who had great hope for a life beyond life due to
their faith and personal relationship to God through Jesus Christ.
I have been at funerals for my grandparents, but this
December was a first for a close family member.
Dad was ready to go. He had asked
that we pray that he go ‘home’ for the last couple of years. Yet his death on December second had a
profound impact on me in two very different ways.
The first impact was the calmness by which Dad faced his own
death. He was not afraid, he was not
stressed out, even in his moment of death, there was a kind of relaxed peace
about him. I have talked many times in
sermons and in funeral devotions about the peace we can have as we face the
reality of death when we know what lies beyond death. It was an amazing display of this reality to
watch as he faced this last step of life with the same kind of calm assurance
he might have facing any of life’s steps. (Actually he was WAY more uptight
doing my wedding ceremony then he was facing his own death!)
The second impact was my own calmness about this whole process
of death, and funerals and the like that came out of my own hope. It was just so clear to me that our shared
hope in God was such a comfort, such a deep kind of peace, that even the tragedy
of death could not shake that. For that
hope made the tragedy mine, or more precisely ours who were left behind rather
than my fathers. He was beyond
suffering, beyond pain, beyond the heartbreak and sorrows of life. Our grief then, needed to be recognized as
being for us and us alone. It was not
necessary or even logical to grieve for him, for he has moved on to something better. We only needed to deal with how we were going
to now face the reality of a new chapter in our own lives as a result of his
being gone.
The key was that shared hope we had life here is but a
stepping stone to life in the presence of God.
A few days after the memorial service was the widely purported
‘end of the world’ on December 22nd.
I found myself thinking, “Bring
it On!” What have we to fear? How might not the hope we have be as real in
that situation as in the facing of a death a few days before?
Now we face the passing of a year and the beginning of a new
year. For me, it is a new year filled with
hope, for as the song says, “For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded
that He is able, to keep that which I’ve committed unto Him against that day.”
With that thought, I can respond with enthusiasm to the
often repeated request “Have a great New year!”
And I will wish that on each of you as well.
