about death: an all saints’ sunday reflection

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Every sunset feels a little like a death to me, most of all in autumn, as darkness comes earlier and trees grow bare.

Rosy air hosts the last hint of light clinging to crinkled leaves, which cling to stiff branches. The chill returns. Gold lays itself on everything. There’s a thickness, holiness, palpable presence among the trees, above the ground, below the sky. Just as if God really is with us.

Clouds and atmosphere saturated with glory and heaven. And above the mountains on the edge of the earth, I see, as it were, infinite different skies, all hues of marigold, plunging deeper, letting go. The horizon seems to absorb colour. My heartbeats march and my breaths quicken. What is this dance? This giving and letting go, light from ground to treetop to only sky. A fade, at once everlasting and instantaneous.

Darkness.

Night.

One might sit for what seems like millennia in the dark, be it truly night or a night of the soul. I’ve sat in deathy darkness enough times to know what that’s like. For one thing, you can’t see. It’s cold. You can’t act. Your words soak straight into the ground. It’s a shroud, a veil.

Was there ever gold, much less marigold? What is this dance, where goodness slips through my fingers no matter how I cling, and all I have is memory, faded?

God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.

1 John 1:5, ESV

What will I tell myself about this? When the sunset has gone and the birds hush their songs.

I will say, “Soul, tell me this: was there ever a day ended that wasn’t followed by a sunrise?”

And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

Revelation 22:5, ESV

When were there ever only sunsets and death?

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

1 Peter 2:9, ESV

When did your God ever fail? Has He not proved faithful?

And He will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of His people He will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for Him, that He might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for Him; let us be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”

Isaiah 25:7-9, ESV

It is no mistake that, just before darkness, there is a sunset, with radiant, blazing beauty that serves to make us love the light, even as we cease to see it. No fluke that those colours are engraved on our hearts and memories as we go into the night.

Just as if God really is with us and will not only stay, but will be there on the other side.

home, by the ancient way

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I gazed on the sunset tonight, and I peered hard at the edge of the world. There the clouds moved like breath among the mountains in dark periwinkle grey, and bright apricot sky stood firm, fading. There I felt the pain of what isn’t, the perfection that’s always beyond my reach, the wholeness I can’t catch or taste in its fullness. And I wept because of the distance between myself and that horizon, that I couldn’t be there at the edge of the light among the shining clouds. And because to the north a towering billow rose to heaven, deepening each second into night, into something I can’t fathom or hold. 

There are so many griefs these days – in your life as well as mine. A life lost to a pernicious disease. Friends relocating. A loss of the way things used to be. It wearies me many days. It feels like an old road, and I the soul-aged traveler.

Don’t we want more? Don’t you feel pain, broken, and probably in more way than one? Among the many things that amaze me is that our Maker is well acquainted with grief. He avoids it not but enters in, and thus can tenderly carry me in my own. The following is one of the dearest passages to me, an exchange between a boy and a Creator.

“But please, please—won’t you—can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?” Up till then [Digory] had been looking at the Lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself. “My son, my son,” said Aslan. “I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.”

(The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis)

Grief is great. Sometimes it seems like the only true thing, but most especially on days when I don’t look up, up from my own breaking, up from my self-pity and self-disappointment. Up from the sharp realities around me to the bigger reality around those.

O my Saviour, how did you look up in your own anguish? How did you remember your Father as you wept in sorrow? How did you stand steadfast as you received injustice and the weight of the world’s sin? How did you love me even as you were pierced and crushed?

Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. I should pray this every day as I go into it, preparing myself to die to my sin, my flesh, myself. Preparing myself to go with God throughout the day. Acknowledging I am truly in his hands, both body and spirit, and he has final say over both. Remembering my Saviour, who spoke these words in his greatest act of love for me, remembering that I go forth now in that very same, deep deep love, never to be separated for all time and beyond it.

In death, my love, I loved you best.

(The Monster in the Hollows, Andrew Peterson)

I have lost much and will continue to lose. Grief will walk with me through life. Yet the greatest gain is mine, for my God looked at me and said, “My beloved.” Grief is great, yet God’s greatness is as the universe to grief’s earthly waves and oceans. The ocean is real, yet the bigger, truer thing is that God loves me. So God will walk with me through life, through death, and past even that to Life.

No matter how much I look, study, feast with my eyes, I never. Never. Never come to the end. I never understand everything. I can’t make sense of it, this existence of glory and dust. I stare lengthily at what God has made and I only feel smaller, less wise, less important, less needed. The more I open my eyes, the more I know my limits. The more I ache for Him to make everything complete and healed and perfect. The piercing beauty is a call to His children, like a horn to the battle. A signal that there is a war and I’m in it. A cry to join in the song of creation, this longing to be fulfilled once and for all. To march in step to His music, obedient to His reckless, steadfast love. To live and love with abandon, with nothing to lose because He is worth everything and cannot be lost. 

Let us be good to one another.

In the morning the once-shrouded mountains shone instead, snow dusted and strong against the blue. They remind me that I am in the hands of One who will remake everything, who redeems brokenness into beauty deeper than before because of that redemption. I’m in His hands, who one morning long ago left a tomb, who made this morning as a shadow of a glimpse of another morning yet to come; on that day, death will be no more. Life will swallow it at last. This is that old road and where it leads. This is the good way. This is the way Home.


This ache is an ancient road that leads to Christ, and I will gladly walk it with my tears in faith.

about God

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One thing I know about us humans is that we’re really good at making everything about us.

Turns out this is an ancient trait. Today I’m reading in early Exodus; God has just called to Moses out of the burning-yet-not-consumed bush and explained His whole plan. Moses is simultaneously in awe and afraid to look at God while standing on holy ground, and obstinately answering Him with excuses. I can’t say I blame him – it’s not a job I’d choose for myself either. Returning to a place where I was a wanted criminal, where my family are slaves, and addressing the king of Egypt to get him to let us leave? Oh and I’ve been living in the wilderness as a shepherd for years – leading just sheep, not masses of people. Oh and I now have a family to think about.

When that’s your life and it’s what you know, it is unnatural to easily adapt to something foreign, a different paradigm, a disruption.

It’s unnatural for us, which is why it has to be supernatural.

Here’s the conversation in a nutshell:

God: I have come down to deliver Israel. I will send you.

Moses: Who am I?

God: I will be with you.

Moses: What if they ask me who You are?

God: I AM who I AM. I will bring you out of the affliction of Egypt. Israel will listen to you. I will strike Egypt. I will give Israel favour.

Moses: They won’t listen to me.

God: I’m giving you signs to do so they listen.

Moses: I am not eloquent.

God: I made your mouth. I will be with you.

Moses: Please send someone else.

(from Exodus 3 and 4)

I’m starting to see a pattern. Both God and Moses are fighting to be the center of the story, the person of consequence in the situation. God has explained His big picture plan to Moses: He wants to bring His people out of slavery into a good land, so Moses will go to Pharaoh and say specific things, then God will strike Egypt with wonders, then Pharaoh will let them go and they will leave with plunder and go to the land of promise. Moses frankly doesn’t agree, or he doesn’t believe God, or maybe both.

Every time God solves a problem, Moses not only doesn’t concede that, he also proposes a new one.

Why? We don’t know all of his motives, but I’m willing to bet there was fear involved, and uncertainty, and some shock, and feeling inadequate, and also some fear.

Initially Moses seems to fear God when they meet, but as conversation ensues he turns out to fear everyone else more. He fears his own people won’t believe him. He fears Pharaoh won’t listen. He fears not having the right answers, not speaking well, and just the whole thing in general. Moses was out of touch with the situation at this point; he didn’t know how Israel felt or what they would believe, but he went with his prediction rather than God’s promise.

I think one thing at the root of this fear and resistance is Moses’ inability to see beyond his own actions and limitations. He’s talking to the God of the universe, and he still thinks that all of this is between him and other people. Whereas God is constantly telling Moses what He will do. God is the one seeing, sending, acting, rescuing, leading, loving. He is the primary actor, but He’s also the story’s author. He moves people where they need to be. He does signs and wonders, He hardens Pharaoh’s heart, He softens Pharaoh’s heart, He lets Israel leave Egypt with an abundance of resources — oh, we can do this all day.

God didn’t need Moses one lick. If He needed only Moses, he wouldn’t have responded to his request to choose someone else by conceding to let Moses’ brother help. This is the God who made a way through a sea on dry land. This is the God who has power over life and death. He didn’t need Moses. But He chose Moses.

I wonder, did Moses know he wasn’t ever supposed to live very far past birth? Did he know he survived beyond the odds such that he would be nursed by his own mother but raised in the royal family not as a slave, so that he would be in a position of freedom giving him the capacity to defend a slave (yes, unfortunately via murder), so that he would flee to where he would come across the daughters of the priest of Midian and assist them, so that he would be invited in and later marry one of those daughters, so that he would stay in Midian as a humble shepherd, so that he would stumble across a burning bush in the wilderness, thereby stumbling into the presence of the living God, leading to this very conversation?

Everything up to this point, and everything after it, was not a series of accidents. That’s as true for you and me as for Moses.

How often do we put limits on what God can do simply because we are limited? How often do we think that what’s happening in our lives and in the world is all between people, and that people are the ones who make things happen?

And when God sends you, or gives you something to do, how easily does it become about you? Are you by default the main character? I am. My needs, my feelings, my actions, my contributions, my deficiencies — they all play a much bigger role in my head and heart than in reality.

This is that different paradigm, the one that’s supernatural. What could change if I believed that God and His doings and His character were of the utmost consequence, and I was only a minor player (if that)?

I would engage in arguments differently, knowing that a) God is the one who will change a mind or a heart, b) whatever we’re arguing about is far smaller than what God is doing eternally, and c) each of us is part of that eternal story.

I would regret less at the end of an unproductive day, because I believe that God did what He wanted to today, and His plans can’t be hindered by my failure. But I’d also be encouraged to start a new day, not feeling the pressure of changing the world but the invitation to be faithful in the next thing, and the next.

My prayers would change. I’d ask God what He’s doing and how He wants me to be part of it (if He does). I’d do that before making plans to fill a calendar.

I’d respond to assignments and invitations from Him more joyfully, knowing that even though I feel stretched to the point of pain and have nothing to give anyone, He is working, will sustain me, and will do all the giving the other person needs. Dying to self includes acknowledging that whatever God is doing is more important than what I want or think I need. Yet how kind He is, that He gives me Himself and all I need when I seek Him and His kingdom.

The implications are too many to enumerate. But let’s go back to Moses for a second. We gave him a hard time.

Spoiler: he did it. He did what God instructed, after all those obstacles he furnished. He went to Egypt and met with his people and showed them the signs. And did he have to argue with them about whether God had sent him? NO. They believed and worshiped, because God had seen them. Now that is the way to respond to God. That’s one of Israel’s best moments, in my opinion. They believed, and they worshiped – two things that make total sense when God is the center of the story. The humility of gratitude when you realize the Lord of creation has seen you; what mercy is this?!

And Moses kept doing the things given to him to do. Yep, he did them imperfectly, enough that he saw the promised land but ended his days outside of it. Yet God continually brought him into His presence, spoke to him, and chose him to lead His people. And we see that this was the plan all along, and that even in his early life he demonstrated he would be a protector and an advocate as God had designed him. He defended a fellow Israelite, and he defended Jethro’s daughters against attacking shepherds. The former made him a fugitive, but the latter brought him into a family – what an improvement in a short time. 😉

And over the years, God shaped him and would neither let him get away with anything, nor let him go. He advocated for his people to Pharaoh and to God Himself. He went on for the rest of his life that way, and then when God chose, he died. Deuteronomy 34 tells us that “his eye was undimmed, and his vigor unabated” at 120 years old, yet God decided it was time. Because God is the author. And though he was flawed and had failed in many ways, “there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face…”

Notice there that it was the Lord who knew Moses; God is still the subject, even in this poignant description of Moses.

Friend, whether you do signs and wonders, whether you’re famous or unknown at your death, whether you raise children or watch others’ grow up, whether you succeed at everything you set your hand to or face constant frustration, whether you have a retirement savings and an inheritance to give or can barely afford your bills, whether you make it to the promised land or everything comes crashing down around you, whether you can speak well or fumble every time, whether you’re respected or ignored or disdained or adored —

Let it be said of you that the Lord knew you face to face, that you believed and worshiped, and that your life testified that your life and the world and the universe and all eternity is always and forever about God.