Death Is Closer Now

No cause for alarm, just pondering the words I heard this morning as I went about my normal read.  

Likely due to the recent losses in my family, or perhaps my body sensing the weakness in my walk, long remembering the vitality it once knew.

Why would you think thoughts so morbid, one might ask?

Mortality is as real as the beautiful Fall season we just witnessed! Winter is next, perhaps intentionally symbolic of what death is, when in reality, more a critical time of incubation than finality. Seeds awaiting new life, a refreshing nurtured, simply beneath the soil.

Living in denial changes nothing.

Paul writes in I Corinthians 15:

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he hath put all things under his feet.” 

“...that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.” We are bare grain!

“How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” That's the unknown!

So we all face one “ last enemy” with hope! And, “because He lives, we shall live also.” How we shall appear seems the one great mystery! 

Perhaps that's why we have such stories as Moses and Elijah at the Mount of Transfiguration, or the unknown man on the road to Emmaus, later revealed to those same disciples as the Christ they were grieving.

"Oh death, where is thy sting!”

It's all good news!