October 1st, 2007
Posted by: Sara Anderson
Life Comes at you Fast!
I alternately laugh and cringe when I see those insurance commercials where things happen suddenly and unexpectedly to people’s cars. There’s the guy who smacks his dashboard, and the engine falls out. There’s the couple who are happily driving through the countryside in a convertible when the woman’s flowing scarf blinds the driver. Fortunately for them, the commercial implies, they have insurance.
As Christians we don’t put our ultimate trust in insurance, but in assurance. Scripture gives us the assurance that if we trust Christ, his Holy Spirit will comfort us, convict us of sin, mark us as his children, strengthen us, encourage us, prepare a place for us with him for eternity. There are no guarantees in this life but death and the unconditional love of God.
In less than two months, Bristol staff members and associates have lost an uncle, a grandmother, a young friend, a mother-in-law and two mothers to death. Most of these happened quite suddenly. Several of us had expected to be making funeral arrangements in the not-so-distant future, just not as soon as we’d thought.
My mother, in her 94th year, had been getting around our house all right with her walker. I had noticed her failing, but until a brittle bone snapped, she appeared to be very healthy for her age. Less than six days later she was gone, having developed pneumonia and accompanying systems failure. I am grateful that her passing was not so sudden that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. I am also thankful that she did not suffer long and did not have to face the stress of leaving home and pets for a nursing facility.
Still, as anyone who has lost loved ones knows, our lives have been shaken up. A few years ago, an elderly friend told me, “I don’t care how old you are, if you are married, if you have children, if you have siblings; there’s something about losing your last parent.”
As well as losing a parent’s support, or the memory of that support, there’s the sense of the torch passing. I half-jokingly told a cousin. “We’re the senior generation now—I’m not sure I want the responsibility.” After all, in our early to mid-fifties, we didn’t feel old enough to (maybe mature enough) to carry to family torch.
We have no guarantees about the length or quality of our lives or the lives of those we love. But we do have that blessed assurance that God is with us—weeping with us, rejoicing with us, supporting us—whenever life seems to come at us too fast.