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- Written by: Don Goulding
For we groan while we are in this tent, since we are weighed down, because we do not want to be unclothed, but clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. (2 Corinthians 5:4)
Mom was swallowed by life. When she was a young adult, ailments began to accumulate. She quietly suffered migraines, hypertension, arthritis, fibromyalgia, neuropathy, hypothyroidism, and lymphoma. In the end, it was not illness that took her, but life that swallowed her whole.
We thought we were here in life fighting to keep Mom from death. Sometime in the last days, as she lay in the hospital, she discovered it was the other way around. Her body was death, and life coaxed her free of the cocoon. She demonstrated this discovery by a joyous countenance as she yielded.
As Mom floated away from suffering, a cable of concern for bereft loved ones held her back. True life drew the cord taut and suspended her in the middle.
“If you need to go,” our family told her, “don’t wait until everyone is gathered for goodbyes.”
The cable disintegrated in a gentle pop. And Mom rose.
An image developed out of the fog, Jesus, arms wide, his life pull urgent. Mom raced to him and it happened at contact. Thrill electrified her spirit. She snapped awake to know her life on earth had been a shadow of this new union. Sparks drifted down to reveal peace—permanent, immovable peace the size of a granite mountain.
All this as the arms of Jesus swallowed Mom in life.
Prayer: Lord Jesus, thank you for consuming my mother in life.
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- Written by: Don Goulding
Look! I will come like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays alert and does not lose his clothes so that he will not have to walk around naked and his shameful condition be seen. (Revelation 16:15)
My dothi is coming loose!
As I took my seat on the stage before hundreds of expectant brown faces at a women’s conference in India, the knot holding my man-skirt popped open. The prospect of going to the podium while my essential covering remained on the chair was troubling. During the longish introductions, I clutched the overlap of my dothi, and slipped offstage for repairs. Most of the ladies never realized how close we were to a foreign clothing train wreck.
In addition to a dothi, I also wear a white robe of righteousness. It covers my sin, because the tag on my robe reads, “Washed in 100% innocent blood.”
Revelation says, “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” While he was on the cross, Jesus filled the washtub with the only agent that can clean sin from robes.
I pushed my filthy garment into the blood of Christ, and the stains lifted away. The brightness of his righteousness fused into each fiber. By the miracle of miracles, it was transformed into a radiant shroud that covers my dirt.
Now, the robe is my secret power. I slip it on and bounce through my days with the innocence of a child. I’m even made bold to live out some of the holiness with which I’m dressed. Nothing I’ve tried by my effort does what my robe does.
I’d be a fool to take my robe off, ever. If I attempt to go even a short while without it, like when I go to church or when I’m praying, Satan points at my guilt and mocks damnation at me. I mustn’t go anywhere at all in my shameful bare self.
Prayer: Jehovah Tsidkenu (The Lord Our Righteousness), save me from my many stains.
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- Written by: Don Goulding
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the people who had come with her weeping, he was intensely moved in spirit and greatly distressed … Jesus wept … But some of them said, “This is the man who caused the blind man to see! Couldn’t he have done something to keep Lazarus from dying?” (John 11:33-37)
Her almond eyes couldn’t hold a focus. For a single heartbeat she saw me, then rocked her head away. A skeletal two-year-old lay in Chennai, India, her crib pushed away from the others, panting her last breaths. While our team toured the orphanage, Jesus led me to stroke the girl’s head, pray, and cry over the life that would never be on earth.
Before our Lord resurrected Lazarus, he took time to weep over his death. He had already declared he would bring his friend back to life, so why waste time grieving? Why not skip the heartache, restore life, and move on to rejoicing? Because when death visits, we should enter its pain, confess its source, and learn from its horror.
To answer the critics of Jesus, yes, he could have prevented the expiration of Lazarus, as well as the orphan girl in India. Instead, he mourned them, just as he mourned the day Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He realized their knowledge included curses and death. Now he mourns that we have the same knowledge.
Beginning with Adam, each of us followed Eve and ate after her in our own way. The curses of hunger, death, hatred, and more destruction than we can recount, poison every part of our life. The dark knowledge Adam and Eve came to know, we know equally well.
Jesus has promised that one day, soon, he will make everything new. No more tears, death, mourning, pain, and no more curse. But why not today? Because today is for mourning. We must weep so that, after creation is restored, we will remember what the tree made us know. Remember Lazarus, remember the orphan girl, and all the breadth of suffering an earthly lifetime can hold. Remember so we will never in all eternity eat from a forbidden tree again.
Prayer: Jesus, let me mourn death now that I might celebrate life through eternity.