Do you realize we are in grave danger of living facade lives? Do you have any idea how many relationship skirmishes we go through---that we believe to be THE battle of a lifetime---that we really don't care about? Can you take it in that one of earth's greatest mistakes is that we believe we cannot forgive another....that there is no more room for love?
What lies we live beneath. What suffocating, ruinous, injurious lies.
Yesterday was Mary Watkins' funeral. This 53 year old indeed lived a life or rebellion. She spent maybe a third of her life in prison. Her addiction to drugs and alcohol followed her to her grave. Yet, a year ago she reached the end of her own rebellious rope. She was baptized into Jesus as a pre-cemetery arrangement....dying to Christ before she died in the flesh.
Mary let her family know of her baptism looking for some signal of acceptance. Yes, she had fought them and hurt them severely over the decades. She got no response. There was no more room for her love. She had burnt all of the bridges......so she assumed. They didn't care anymore...she thought.
Yesterday I stood in the family cemetery. Mary's grave is up against where her dad will be buried...right beside him....along with her deceased mother and brother. If Mary could only have known they loved her enough to bring her home to be beside them, it would have been one of her few heart-warming thrills. But the family couldn't say to her they cared. They did. They showed it....after the fact.
How about you? Who in your life has hatred blinded you to the truth that you really do possess a love for your assumed enemy? Words of acceptance may not rectify damage uncontrol, but they surely may be just enough of a hint that souls could begin to heal. We must be careful to speak words of life....even to those who betray us....for in those words we may find we have personally created a new person we had no idea existed.
4 comments:
As usual great thoughts. Thanks for inspiring me to better ministry.
Very powerful Terry.
From an ex-preacher turned funeral director to a favorite preacher / write of mine ... Excellent!
Greg England
Terry, There is truely a good lesson that we both could and likely should preach long and hard. It is a lesson many around us will never learn, and in the end will have to answer for.
Roy Coffman
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