Guest Author - LeeAnn Bonds
‘Tis the season for weddings and graduations. Eager brides start planning months in advance, and restless high school seniors count the days to freedom. With shopping and celebrating, visiting and preparations, everyone’s schedule is packed in no time. But no matter how solidly the weekends are booked with bridal showers, wedding rehearsals, reunions and graduation parties, a funeral can always be fit in.
Funerals are seldom planned far in advance, and rarely anticipated with eagerness. You schedule them when you have to, and they trump whatever else was on the calendar. Grief, shock, regrets, and stress can characterize the planning of funerals, in painful contrast to the festive aura common to weddings and graduations.
But for a select group of people, an approaching funeral might engender some true rejoicing. Rejoicing mixed with deep sorrow, to be sure, but the undercurrent is there: joy, peace, eager anticipation. Because for children of God, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. That’s how the Apostle Paul put it.
Paul told the Philippians that he was hard pressed to decide whether to stay or go. He knew that to depart (die) and be with Christ was far better, and only the obligation he felt to continue helping the new churches compelled him to be content with staying planet-side a while longer. Of course, Paul had a rough go. Once he recorded a succinct list of his trials, and it included being beaten with rods, being stoned, being shipwrecked and adrift in the sea for a night and a day, robbers, betrayals, insomnia, hunger and thirst, cold, nakedness, and the stress of his concern for all the churches. We might think it made sense for him to long for Heaven, and it did. What we often don’t contemplate is how much sense it makes for us to long for Heaven. Even if our life here is cushy and sweet, Heaven is light-years better.
Many of us have been subtly brainwashed all through our lives by Hollywood’s stupid portrayal of Heaven as boring, or bureaucratic, or unfair, or not as good as earth. What a bunch of hogwash. Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians that “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him." Jesus tells us (in John 14) that He personally prepares a place for each of us in one of the many dwelling places in His Father’s house (that would be Heaven). I have to admit, I fantasize about my dwelling place now and then. A fireplace, a deep leather chair, a bottomless teapot, a purring cat, and towering, overflowing bookcases lining each wall feature prominently in my winter musings. In summertime, I’m more likely to envision forests, streams, sunny island beaches with no sunscreen needed, and expeditions to the Milky Way or the Crab Nebula. Talking with Jesus, singing in a colossal choir, soaring flight, deep ocean dives, meeting Enoch and Melchizedek and Ruth…the possibilities are endless and that’s just what HAS entered my heart. What God has actually prepared will make my fantasies seem like cardboard scenery in a junior high play.
Christians sometimes speak of a friend who has died as having been promoted to glory. What a vivid phrase that is. We who remain grieve and miss our loved one, but they are released from all grief and care, suffering and worry. All that drops away and they meet Jesus face to face in brilliant glory. They finally see everything clearly. They’re ready to begin the real adventure. I can rejoice with them thinking of that. I still grieve, but not as the unbelievers, without hope. My separation from the ones I love is only temporary, and when we are reunited there will be no more partings, no more tears, only joy and glory and undreamed-of adventure forever.
