I have chosen not to include any photos with this edition of my blog. I hope you will consider it anyway
Today I have been thinking of the passing of my cousin. Amy is the oldest child of my first cousin James & Marilyn Appleby. As she grew, thank the Lord, she became the physical image of her mother. .
As I shared her passing with a friend they remarked, “No one wants to outlive their children . . . . it just isn’t right.” I paused for a moment before answering them as my natural inclination was to agree. From the perspective of this life in this world it seems upside down. None of us really want to outlive our children . . . . We want them to have a long, fulfilling and meaningful life. Somehow when they die young we think they were cheated of something.
As I thought about Amy and this idea of dying too young I remembered a preacher talking about a man and he said “He lived to be 70 but he died at 35. The point being that longevity does not equal a well lived life. Longevity only means you got old. In Amy’s case her 50 years were packed with meaningful living.
Our families were close in those days. From early childhood right on through seminary James and I shared life. The first 26 years of our lives were like the strands of a rope woven together. We attended the same schools, felt the call of God to the preaching ministry, and in general shared life. It was in the midst of these years that Amy was born. Indeed, I recall the night Amy was born . . . . I remember the telephone call from James announcing her arrival . . . . I still treasure how Susan and I caught his excitement and it became ours. It was not something we would feel until the next year our first child was born.
I’ll be honest I never expected to out live any of my children or those of my cousins. I suspect none of us do. Such is not the natural order of things. We expect to watch our children grow, marry, give us grandchildren and then repeat the process themselves. We wanted our children to grow up healthy, marry well, become the best they can be, honor God with their lives and live to watch their own families do the same. There is something wrong with folks who don’t want that. After all, it is the natural order of things. And because it is the natural order of things we feel something is wrong when it doesn’t happen that way. It is just not right we say.
But our God is not bound by the natural order of things. Sometimes He chooses to shake up the natural order and do things differently. But He never does so without reason. That reason may be beyond our understanding but like the other side of the horizon it is there. I don’t know why Amy had to be taken from us so soon. And to be perfectly honest I am not even sure I like it. Was it the Lord releasing her from the agony of her disease (cancer); was it because she had finished the course He had given her to run; was it to teach us something about facing our own impending death with faith in God’s provision . . . . I don’t know. But as my Indian friend, Sam Matthews, used to remind me frequently as he put his hands together palms up and looking skyward, “Brother David” he would say, “Our times are in His hands.”
I heard someone once say about death and our view of it that “Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight." I have been blessed of God to travel much of the world and in every departure there was the sadness of a goodbye but no sooner had the doors to aircraft closed that we began to be excited about the people waiting on the other end of our flight to greet us.
Over the years I have learned from my family (The Appleby Clan) that death is not a time of sorrow. For our family it has always been a time of celebration. General George S. Patton in speaking of the men in his 3rd Army who had died fighting the evils of Naziism expressed the same idea when he said, “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” That is what we do.
We rejoice and celebrate that God put them in our life; that he blessed them as they lived; that they trusted and served their Lord; and that they have now gone to heaven where they shall enjoy he Lord forever. We mourn our loss but we celebrate the gift of life He gave them. We rejoiced, as I mentioned earlier, when we learned that God had breathed life into Amy and she became a living soul and again when through faith in Jesus she received eternal life. Hence our sadness is turned into joy . . . . . the joy of the Lord and that is our strength.
The horizon my be the limit of our physical sight but because of our faith in Jesus it is not the limit of our view. Through His word God has given us both the assurance that the horizon (death) is not the end of our life. Further more, it has given us a peek beyond the horizon. That peek gives us an assurance that the horizon is not the limit to our lives.
I remember when I was flying a vintage aircraft (a T-6 Texan) and coming out of a barrel roll my back seat driver reminded me that as we came out of the roll to not let up on the turn until the nose of the aircraft was above the horizon. Until the nose of the plane was above the horizon we were losing altitude. We must look above the horizon so we can see beyond the horizon.
What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived – these are the things God has prepared for those who love him – and these things lie just beyond the horizon. We see them in part but once we get beyond the horizon we behold them as they are. “We are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” In the opening paragraph I mentioned that my cousin grew to be the physical image of her mom. Now I am pleased to announce she has taken on the spiritual image of her Lord . . . our Lord.
Bev Shea used to sing a wonderful Christian Song entitled If We Could See Beyond Today that speaks of the difference between our perspective on life.
If we could see beyond today
As God can see,
If all the clouds should roll away,
The shadows flee;
O'er present griefs we would not fret
Each sorrow we would soon forget,
For many joys are waiting yet,
For you and me.
If we could know beyond today
As God doth know,
Why dearest treasures pass away,
And tears must flow;
And why the darkness leads to light
Why dreary days will soon grow bright,
Some day life's wrong will be made right,
Faith tells us so.
If we could see, if we could know,
We often say.
But God in love a veil doth throw
Across our way.
We cannot see what lies before,
And so we cling to Him the more
He leads us till this life is o'er,
Trust and obey.
In a temporal sense we cannot see beyond today. We anticipate what God has prepared for us but we cannot know the fulness of what He has prepared. By faith we see the unseen and we know the unknown. What’s more we know that those of us who have owned Jesus Christ as our Lord will be reunited with our loved ones who have already journeyed beyond the horizon.
We are firmly committed to the promise of Jesus who said of those who placed their faith in Him as their Lord and Savior, “And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand. I and my Father are one.”
Folks we are not going to have eternal life after we die . . . . we have it right now. Death is not the end of life. Death is merely the door through which we will pass from the temporal realm to the heavenly realm. It is that moment of transition where we shed our mortal body and take on our spiritual body. Until then we will work and we will rejoice not knowing when the hour of our own departure shall be but confident of this one thing that the same Jesus in whom we have believed will in that day receive us unto himself.
People who know me know that I am a major proponent of hymns and I have a lot of reasons for that. One is how they express the truths of God’s promises to us. My favorite hymn reminds me of the assurance I have in Jesus The first verse says,
Blessed assurance Jesus is mine,
Oh what a foretaste of glory Divine,
Heir of salvation, purchase of God
born of his Spirit, washed in His blood.
This is my story this is my song,
praising my savior all the day long.
So that, Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate, And hath shed His own blood for my soul
