Soul {it happened on a sunday} day 30

We spent yesterday at a funeral.  It was the first one we took our children in six years, since they spend the first five minutes of their great-grandpa's service screaming and pounding on a window and I excused myself and took them on a walk through the woods behind the church.  To be fair, they were ages 3 and not quite 1 (and the youngest not yet born), so thinking they would be able to sit through a Catholic funeral service might have been naive of us.  But the memory of that day, and my missed opportunity to mourn the passing of my husband's grandfather, and my inability to be there with him during an emotional day, was heavy on my mind.

I spent the past week talking to the boys about death, a concept that they don't entirely grasp yet.  I explained that death is something that makes us sad, because we will miss the person who has gone.  I explained that real life is not like video games, that people don't regenerate (or respawn).  We get one chance at the life we're given.  And I explained that I believe we each have a soul connected to our bodies in life, and that death is the departure of the soul.

I have attended, maybe not a lot, but certainly enough, funerals and calling hours in my life, and the existence of the soul is more evident to me in its absence.  I have looked upon the bodies of family and loved ones, and the strange stillness, the complete absence of them makes it an uncomfortable experience.  Whatever made that person laugh or cry or want to dance is gone; the love that they showed me, that I was able to return, has left.

And what more than these issues of life or death is at the crux of faith, of the major belief systems of our world?  None of us has first-hand experience, concrete evidence of what happens to that soul after it departs.  We are left to imagine, to wonder, to seek out the spiritual when the physical world has failed us.  For me, this is where I lean heavily on the writer of Hebrews, who states in chapter 11, verse 1, "To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see."

My beliefs about life after death, about the existence and nature of heaven and hell, have undergone many iterations, as I'm sure you can deduce from this series.  This is where I stand today, being certain of my hopes that the promises from the end of Revelation are true, and that one day God will bring all of His people together in a new city, where all the former things have passed away.  I long for God to dwell in my midst, to wipe every tear from my eyes, to bring about a place where there is no more death or sorrow or pain.  I cannot see a spiritual plane where men and women come together and worship God for all eternity, but I believe it is there, and I believe some day I will get to live among them.  I believe I will see familiar faces, though they may be altered from how I remember them, clothed in the fullness of who God made them to be.  I believe we won't struggle to understand each other any longer, that the defining characteristic of eternity will be unity in thought and purpose.

It also seems clear from my study of the Bible that some people won't be there, that some will miss out on this experience.  All I can say about that, is how glad I am that I don't serve in the role of judge.  I trust God to know the hearts of all mankind, to know our thoughts as well as our deeds, and to correctly designate the eternal resting place of every soul.  This certainly complicates things here, and we argue with each other and label religious ideas as "hate" or intolerance.  I agree that this is harsh, but I also know that if I claim to believe some parts of the Bible, then I need to own a belief in the whole book.  The promises of God are amazing and sometimes exceedingly generous.  So are God's warnings.

The most closely held belief I have, in regards to the soul, is that God desires an abundant life for every person.  I believe that abundance begins here and now and only grows in the world beyond what we can see.  I have experienced fullness in this life, as a mother, as a wife, as a friend.  I see God's goodness on display in a funeral service with 30 people gathered to celebrate 90 years of life, for the way we care for each other in our grief and continue the love and tenderness practiced by our parents and grandparents.  I feel that abundance in the laughter that accompanies the sharing of stories, the common memories, and the closely protected treasures of family.  With the awareness of life and death so timely, I continue to hope that when my life has reached its conclusion, there will be something worth celebrating by those I leave behind.