How To Outlive Your Life

That little ride in the country was Carl’s way of telling me that he understood the extent of my loss and his way of telling me that our lives would never be the same again. When someone you love dies it breaks your heart and sometimes the grief is indescribable.

It has been nearly twenty years now and every year there is an inner clock inside of me that begins to tick in January and a sense of sadness sets in through March 15 as I live in anticipation of that sad day in our lives.

I was curious about the way they grieved in Moses’ day… when someone died they declared a period of mourning… they wept and the mourned for thirty days, after which the period of mourning was over. And then they got on with their lives.

We all know it isn’t all that simple but it was their way of honoring Moses. It was their way of marking his life and acknowledging who he was and what he meant to them.

As followers of Christ we grieve like everyone else... but not exactly. In I Thessalonians Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica saying, “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in the death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.” I Thessalonians 4:13

Yesterday in my devotional reading I read from Romans 8. It was the passage that says, “If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” Romans 8:11 In other words, though we mark the passing of our loved ones with sadness we do so with the hope. We, as body people, have bodies that are mortal. But we also believe that we are spirit people and that our spirits are immortal. We believe that though our bodies die our spirits do not.

So while we gather to mark the death of our loved ones we also mark our hope because the bible teaches us that we are confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord… and to absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. II Corinthians 5:6-8

Bob Russell tells the story of his father’s death and how on the day of the funeral the weather so bad and the roads so impassable that he and his brother and their sons, along with the funeral director, made it to the gravesite. The snow was so deep that they had to carry the casket the final stretch down to the grave where they lowered the casket into the frozen ground.

And then he tells of how the seven of them gathered around that grave and he prayed the prayer of committal, “Father, this is a cold and lonely place but I thank you that to be absent from the body is to be safe in your warm arms.” (Bob Russell, Favorite Stories, PreachingToday.com.)

One of the secrets to outliving your life is to leave loved ones who love you and who are comforted by your hope of eternal life.

Another way to outlive yourself is to entrust your hopes to others.