From Christianity Today--
I remember
the first time I touched a dead body. It was at my grandfather’s
funeral. You know the scene: attendants in boxy black suits, the cloying
scent of flowers, tissue boxes, breath mints, dusty funeral parlor
furniture. As the sad murmur of relatives droned all around, I stepped
up to the coffin and quickly reached in to touch his embalmed hands,
folded nicely on his belly. They felt like cold, soft leather.
That was when death was still an anomaly to me, an
outlier. Now it has become familiar, a recurring pattern in recent weeks
and months. For the past several years, I’ve served as a pastor in a
suburban parish, an evangelical who made his home in a mainline church. I
don’t run the show, since I’m a lay pastor, but I’ve been there for
most of the funerals. In the past few years we’ve had almost 40 in our
parish. Those are a lot of faces I won’t get to see any more on Sunday
mornings. Death is no longer a stranger to me; it is a regular part of
my life.
This has been one of the more difficult parts of being a
pastor, seeing people who faithfully served our Lord over decades take
ill and start a steep decline. These deaths don’t have the shock of
tragedy, of teenagers hit by cars or babies born without breath. Still,
the dull ache of sorrow is there.
More here-
No comments:
Post a Comment