On The Couch

Buona sera familiar friends and random readers,

     Today was pretty crazy, an adventure of people, as two people who I barely know and a complete stranger opened up to me about deaths in their families. More interesting was the fact that each story carried a completely different emotional reaction. It was my day off, but there is no rest in the Lord's work. This is not a complaint, but rather the acknowledgement of a privilege and something for which I am thankful that God has blessed to be able to do.
     The first was a young man I met in church. He is twenty years old, and we went out to watch the Avengers for his birthday yesterday. He invited me to his house to meet his mom and have dinner with them where his mom told me a little about the death of his father two years ago. I went back today because his mom offered to wash my clothes and he wanted to hang out this afternoon. Today he opened up completely, telling me in intricate detail about the days leading up to his father's death and the day he passed there in his house. He was composed as he recounted the story, and even laughed as he reminisced about his final days with his dad. He didn't seem down trodden, He seemed a little lost. I asked him what he learned in the experience and the process of grief that followed. He said that is what he had been trying to answer for some time now. I asked him to get his Bible. He returned and said it was his father's. We went over Romans 8:28-39, which I heard at both a student's and a friend's funeral last year in East St. Louis. My grandma also gave me that verse when she spoke of the death of my uncle almost forty years ago. He talked more about the Bible itself, and opened to the last page where his father wrote out Phillipians 1:21 in Spanish. "For me is to live is Christ and to die is gain." He also spoke of how the situation allowed him to counsel a neighbor who lost his mother recently.
     Soon after I went to one of my coach's houses where one of my trainers was going to try to get rid of a hematoma on my hamstring with a massage. I laid down on the couch in his living room where his wife and his daughter came in to talk to me. His daughter was explaining to me that she was a widow. She and her mother were laughing almost contemptuously about her husband's passing. He overworked himself and refused to go to Cuba to get the treatments he needed. She is now forty with two kids. She works and has a good job. She talked extensively about how God has provided for her. In this case I just listened. I was honestly shocked inside by what I had just witnessed, but who knows what was really going on with her. Everyone grieves in their own way, and I am here to preach the good news, not to judge others.
     Her mother began to recount the death of one of her sons. He was murdered by her other son. She talked about how horrible she felt for rejecting him for killing his brother. that is the strength of a mother's love I guess. Again I stayed quiet and listened. What advice or nuggets of wisdom could I possibly offer for something so atrocious? She cried and held a rag to her eyes, as she continued to tell the story. I realized she just needed to be heard. Afterwards, she began to talk about all of the blessings she experienced after going through such a terrible tragedy, talking about travels, providence, healing, and many other things big and small where she felt God's hands on her life.
     James wrote, "This life is but a vapor." Whatever you may be going through in the moment, you can count on the promise of greater things to come if you accept Christ as your personal savior. Personally, I have attended many funerals, friends, families, a student, all different ages and for numerous reasons. I've also been close to dying on several occasions in my short life, be it almost drowning in a river, getting mugged, or attempting to kill myself when I was younger. Mourning is natural and necessary for our well-being, but I am reminded greatly of the real importance of this life by what I read in the young man's father's Bible. "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain." We have eternal life to look forward to if we are saved. Rejoice for those who have passed in the Father's hands, and be thankful for his Son's sacrifice that allows us to pass into His glory.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither heighth nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus." - Romans 8:38-39

"The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised." Job 1:21b

Que dieu te benisse,
Seth