Morning Musing: 1 Thessalonians 4:13

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Something a little different this morning. I’ve recently been reminded about how hard loss can be. Saying goodbye to loved ones when they close their eyes on this life is one of the hardest things we will face in this life. It leaves us disoriented and struggling to make sense out of…everything. Tomorrow starts to feel pointless, and hope seems nowhere to be found. And yet, if you are follower of Jesus, there’s this thing Paul said about not grieving like those who have no hope. Why? Let’s talk about it for a bit, and then I’d like to share a song with you that puts the hope Paul is talking about in a way that helps us to grasp it a little better.

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Digging in Deeper: 1 Thessalonians 4:13

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in a hard, sad world. We are surrounded by brokenness everywhere we look. It takes all different forms and shapes and sizes. But the worst brokenness of all is death. Death takes us away from life and purpose and meaning and everyone and everything we love and who loves us. It is a profound disruption of our lives whenever it occurs. And so, when we face it, we grieve. Yet how we grieve matters and says a lot about how we happen to see the world. Disney’s latest film offering, The Haunted Mansion, takes us right into the thick of these big, hard questions, and forces us to reckon with them. Let’s talk about the movie today and why it’s not what you might think.

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Morning Musing: 1 Thessalonians 4:13

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Last week we talked about the Netflix series, Virgin River. I don’t usually come back to talk about the same series so soon after hitting it once, but as I watched the penultimate episode of season three last night, I was bothered enough I couldn’t ignore it. And I was going to wait until tomorrow like I usually do, but events in my own life lined up such that today is the right day for it. We’ll go back to Mark tomorrow instead. Today, we need to talk about a funeral.

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Digging in Deeper: 1 Thessalonians 4:13

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the ideas people like to throw around sometimes today is that dying is easy. Usually the corollary idea paired with that is that living is hard. That kind of notion can be made to sound philosophically sagacious. Someone with a loud pen (or keyboard as is more often the case these days) can fire it off and be guaranteed a near viral load of retweets and reposts. But the truth is that it is just a platitude. It doesn’t add anything really meaningful to a conversation that nearly everyone has at some point in our lives. Should our Lord tarry, death is coming for us all eventually. And while dying may be easy in the sense that it really doesn’t take any effort on our part, death is hard. I’m thinking about this today because a good man I know is facing his own death. These are some thoughts with him in mind.

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