Sometimes God has to get us out of our seats, because he’s got someone we need to meet. That happened to me today, an otherwise ordinary day. I’d been sitting at my desk too long, and felt the need to move. After checking on staff, I turned to go back toward my office, and there she was — an old friend I hadn’t seen in months, maybe over a year.
That’s when God reminded me. Her daddy died this week.
I put out my arms to hug her, and the tears began…for us both. She told me she was hoping she’d run into me, and I took her by the shoulder and said, “let’s go to my office.”
We talked about her sweet father and the upcoming funeral. She told me that she was comforted, knowing he was with Jesus, but her heart was burdened for her nieces and nephews. “I just want to know they’ll be where Dad and I will be one day. Will you pray for them?”
As I prayed for her family and those who need to know Jesus, I thought about how death is a good reminder that this life is not the be all, end all. Death reminds us of what’s really important — eternity.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.*
God has set eternity in our hearts with the gift of a soul. The body ends, the soul does not. Are you feeling it, or do you have no sense of eternity because you are living for yourself and today alone? Just because we might quench the feeling, doesn’t make it any less of a reality. Death will come, eternity will begin, one place or the other.
So, I prayed for my friend’s family that they would come to the reality of eternity and settle it once and for all with God through Christ. What better place to meet Jesus than at a funeral? My friend told me that when she dies, she wants the Gospel preached at her funeral. I echoed that desire. It’s easy to do, when you want everyone to know where you’re going and how to follow.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time,” even death, because it reminds us that eternity must be faced by us all. Yes, it’s hard to lose a dad, but it’s so much worse to lose a soul. I’m glad our dads knew Jesus.
How’s your eternity looking? Are you feeling it?
Put it in the hands of the one who set it in your heart in the first place. Give it to Jesus.
Grace and Peace
*Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)