On Thursday I performed a funeral for a young man who died suddenly. He was my age, and in getting to know him, I found that we had a lot in common.
It’s hard to explain the death of someone in their late 40’s. In fact, you can’t explain it. We come to funerals like this showing our lack of understanding. There really is so much that we don’t understand. Most of the time we can hide it well, we can appear to be in control of our own lives, our own destiny. But once in a while something happens that seems very unfair, shockingly unfair, and we realize that we really don’t understand as much as we might have thought we understood.
These things that we can’t understand can rock our world. They shake our foundations. We thought we knew a little bit about life, and then something happens to remind us we really don’t. But we want to. More than anything, the human race wants to understand. We pursue understanding. Everyone of us, to some extent, thinks we understand things. We all develop our own opinions. We believe we know the way things are. So it can be particularly devastating to find that we don’t understand the really big things. Life. Death. Disease. As hard as we try, we find that there is always more that we don’t understand, then what we do understand.
Perhaps one of God’s greatest blessings is the ability to find peace, even in those situations we may never understand. Peace is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). Understanding isn’t.
When your foundations are shaken, seek God’s peace. We may never understand, but we may find peace.
It’s hard to explain the death of someone in their late 40’s. In fact, you can’t explain it. We come to funerals like this showing our lack of understanding. There really is so much that we don’t understand. Most of the time we can hide it well, we can appear to be in control of our own lives, our own destiny. But once in a while something happens that seems very unfair, shockingly unfair, and we realize that we really don’t understand as much as we might have thought we understood.
These things that we can’t understand can rock our world. They shake our foundations. We thought we knew a little bit about life, and then something happens to remind us we really don’t. But we want to. More than anything, the human race wants to understand. We pursue understanding. Everyone of us, to some extent, thinks we understand things. We all develop our own opinions. We believe we know the way things are. So it can be particularly devastating to find that we don’t understand the really big things. Life. Death. Disease. As hard as we try, we find that there is always more that we don’t understand, then what we do understand.
Perhaps one of God’s greatest blessings is the ability to find peace, even in those situations we may never understand. Peace is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). Understanding isn’t.
When your foundations are shaken, seek God’s peace. We may never understand, but we may find peace.
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