A Dread Ahead

August 4 2020

These days I am walking around with a sick feeling in my gut.  I have lost to death some very significant people in my life.

There was my dad when I was six years old.

At twelve years old I lost my grandpa who had stood by me thick and thin through all kinds of trauma as a child.

Besides my great grandfather, various aunts and uncles through the years whom I loved dearly, ( I only have one living uncle now on both sides of my family),  besides my other grandfather, my husbands grandfather, whom I loved, and both my grandmothers in the eighties, I have no one living in my family now that is from the generation above me except one uncle and my mother.

My cousins now have begun to die.  I have lost two first cousins recently and one of their wives.  

Over three years ago I lost my husband. 

Death has become real to me.

Tomorrow is burial of one of the few  best few friends I have ever had.  We went back to the 70's. 

My mother is 91 and when I think of her leaving is when the sick feeling comes.

There is no way to stop it or to pretend it is not real.  It is happening!  It has been happening since God created humans. We know it.  We believe it, but we don't feel it.  We push it back to someplace in our brain that doesn't want to deal with it, thinking absurdly that surely it will not happen to us or to someone we love.

But it will.

I have a new yard man.  He is 78+..   I thought about him today, the day he dies.  If I try to be nice to him and to really listen to his stories ( he likes to talk) that will mean that I will begin to know him.  If I begin to know him, then that means, when he dies I will feel sad, so sad.

There is no getting around death; however, it most certainly is not a permanent thing. Christ has already taken care of that business.  Death will be put down permanently by the death sentence that is waiting on it.  The closer, Jesus Christ!  

1 Corinthians 15:54  So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”  (KJV)

1 Corinthians 15:54 But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I’ll probably never fully understand. We’re not all going to die—but we are all going to be changed. You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes—it’s over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we’ll all be changed. In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal. Then the saying will come true: Death swallowed by triumphant Life! Who got the last word, oh, Death? Oh, Death, who’s afraid of you now? It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God! ( The Message)

S