Birthday… We count them. We celebrate…..
We have cake, give gifts, sing songs. We mark the occasion of time having passed.
Every one of the days I gave birth to my children is a day that I count and remember.
Today is a friend’s birthday. It is also the day her father is laying in a casket awaiting a different occasion tomorrow.
I am sad for her, sad for her loss. I am saddened that her birthday will have this shadow cast on it. But I am happy that she knew the love of her father and for the relationship she had with him.
Birth days are exciting. New babies arrive on birth days. Birthdays are fun. We party and feast on family and great food. They are days that we greet new life and recognize the passing of the years.
Funerals are of a different sort, yet for those who belong to Jesus, they are days we recognize the passing of time in this realm, and greet new life in the next.
We will all pass thru the veil from this realm to the next. Unless Jesus comes back first…and even then, “…..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. (1 Cor. 15:51-53 The Message)
My friend’s father will have a funeral. I may have one too.
Or maybe He will come before then…..
Either way, I’m a winner.
