Right now I have several friends and family members who are battling cancer or some other life-threatening illness, and I am reminded of just how short our time on earth is. Some days--the really hard ones--I'm okay with that, because I know that eternity with my God will be perfection. No more sadness and pain. Only God in all His glory. Forever.
Still, there are other days when I am especially enjoying this God-given experience called my life, and I don't really want it to change. Maybe it's just because I'm comfortable; it's familiar to me. Because of this, however, I am susceptible to becoming complacent, and it often takes the threat of the death of a loved one to shake me out of this.
But isn't that threat always there? At any moment in time, our lives on this earth can end. Some people are given an advanced warning through illness and are able to say their good-byes, though they are said through great pain. Others are taken so swiftly--and often much too soon, in our opinions. Many deaths seem senseless, that they could have easily been prevented. These are the hardest to wrap our minds around.
I don't like to dwell in the subject of death, but I do think it's healthy to visit it from time to time. It makes me ask myself what I'm really doing with my life and helps keep things in perspective, which is what people always say when someone dies. And then a few days later, we're back to complaining about the cell phone bill or our jeans fitting too tightly or about how much it's rained. Why is it so easy for us to do this?
My heart is grieving for those whose time on earth is coming to an end and for those to whom they are closest, because they're really the ones that suffer. When my husband or I take a trip without the other one, it's always the one who is left behind that has the hardest time with being apart.
It's a shame that it takes separation for us to fully appreciate each other.
1 comment:
Thank you for your well written piece. Many of us unfortunately have read horror stories about the funeral business. Regrettably there are companies selling cremation urns online which are not much more reputable. While they spend lavish amounts of money on web sites dripping with sympathy – many of these companies are nothing more than a site that drop ships product. Beware of sellers that do not have a physical address or the names of the principals of the company on the site – what are they hiding from? I had an issue with a company called Perfect Memorials ( Perfectmemorials.com ) and there was no one from the company that would talk to me. While I could call to order an urn – I could not speak to an owner or manager over the phone – they insisted that we only communicate via email. An evasive tactic if I ever saw one! Perfect Memorials is really a company that invested heavily in the web – but puts very little into the human contact part of the funeral/memorial industry. I would be careful of Perfectmemorials.com and others like them.
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