...Death
..."Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal." By Jesus weeping-John 11:35, he let's us know. You don't get over it, you just get through it. Your don't get by it, because you can't get around it. It doesn't 'get better'; it just gets different. Everyday. ...When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose them all at once; you lose them in pieces over a long time -- the way the mail stops coming, and their scent fades from the room and even from the clothes in their closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of them that are gone. Just when the day comes -- when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that their gone, forever -- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part...
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Moses was gut-level honest about this reality. He says, “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength” (Psalm 90:10). This from a guy who didn’t even lead God’s people out of Egypt until he was in his eighties! Moses goes on to say of our years: “yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.”
I suppose old Moses may have just been having a bad day when he wrote this, but I suspect, more accurately, that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Moses had one of those wake-up-to-your-own-mortality kind of moments where he became aware, in a fresh way, that he wasn’t going to be around forever. And so his heart’s cry was very simple: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). In other words, “Lord, I need you to clearly show me how to use the time that I have left.”
How could Mary not have remembered ....as she stood there, perhaps with her own son’s blood spattering onto her face, as he writhed in pain before her eyes? The heart within her was sword-pierced, indeed. George Floyd called out for his own mother as we watched George Floyd take his last breaths on camera, as a police officer kneeled on his neck, he spoke. He said, "I can't breathe," and then he called out for his mother. He sputtered out "Mama" with some of his last breaths. Then he lay still forever.
Psalm 22 says, “Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother’s breasts. On you was I cast from my birth, and from my mother’s womb you have been my God. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help” (Ps. 22:9-11).
Jesus spoke of Peter’s own coming crucifixion by saying “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go” (John. 21:18). Maybe the way so many think of their mothers, even when those mothers are long deceased themselves—at the hour of their deaths is itself a grace of God, reminding us in our dependence that we were dependent before, and yet we were loved.