Blog.

I ran across this post and the follow-up post and was deeply moved by her story. Here is a young woman (mid 20’s, I think, with a young child) that lost her husband in a tragic accident when his boat capsized in frigid waters in Oregon.  Looking back on the day when they were still searching for his body, she wrote these words:

my main prayer was, “Lord, help me to be okay with whatever you are giving me right now. Whether he is alive or with You, You are still good.” People were calling me all day long for updated information, and they would say things like, “Nate’s so strong. Strong men like him don’t just drown. He probably swam to shore and passed out or something…” And they would wait for me to agree with them, like I was going to give them the hope that the worst was not true. But instead, God completely flipped my heart to where I was just telling them, “Whether Nate is alive or dead right now, God is still good. God is still good.”

That, my friends, is what a genuine relationship with Christ looks like.

This is another article linked by Jeff that truly saddened me. The Washington Post set up a 40 min “concert” by world renown violinist Joshua Bell (and his 3.5 million dollar violin) disguised as a street performer at a subway stop in downtown DC. Over 1,000 people rushed by on their way to whatever they were doing with only a small handful ever acknowledging his presence. Read it here.

How often do we rush through life without stopping to soak up the beauty that God has placed around us? Whether it be music, mountains, art, or the simple laughter of a child, most of us are too caught up in our lives to notice the things in life that connect with our soul, those God given moments that inspire awe and wonder. Unlike a promotion, a good grade on a test, or that new car/plasma TV we all work for, it is those moments that make a lasting impression on us, an impression that will linger in the memory long after all the other things fade away. May we all learn to stop and hear the whispers of God…

Thanks to my friend Jeff for linking this article on his blog. A doctors perspective on how the realization of death affects the living: go here.

“What I have learned from my patients since that day is that we give death power (as if it needs it) — power not to kill us but to rivet us, to silence us, to drive us from our humanity while we still live. We give death power precisely to the extent that we work to ignore it, to blind ourselves to its closeness, to imagine we have the power to stave it off forever. If we go through life imagining that, then the moment when we are forced to look at death can only rupture everything we know and paralyze us, still alive. That’s not a good way to die. “