Death, where is your sting?

How can we not talk about death when it looms so near over people I know or upon the people of people I know? It sidles up to me (not in a physical sense amen) and doesn't speak, but I smell the stank on its breath, the laborious hisses of breath. I don't know its name, it is unfamiliar to me. But I see it come and go, leaving unwelcomed gifts along its way.

Does God take people away? Yes, yes, God is good. Yes, yes, God is great. But could death be "according to His plan"? After all, isn't physical death everlasting spiritual life? Could death be respite? Could death be grace?

I wrote a poem. Everyone calm down. I don't like poems. Anyone could write anything, break it up into little paragraphs and call them stanzas. And it's a poem. (This has nothing to do with how bad a literature student I was. Coincidence, I tell you.)

It's not finished (big surprise):

Let not us talk about martyrs

Who fit ill with this thought

Talk instead about the young

And how eventual the death they caught

Perhaps but "young" is the mistake

For a box is too, too small

For a God wider and above wonder

For imagination to careless create

(O, did I just ruin the pattern?

Folly, O me, bad student of compunction.)

Are they all used up?

Running the plan to completion?

Allowed to come back in

By a controversially unanimous decision?

(Or maybe derision?)

Could it be one of compromission?

Compromission?

A compromised mission?

The captain early in His signal

Calling back His soldiers

Abort! Aboard! 

I am pleased, my servant

Good, I say to your hands

Faithful, I speak to your heart

You have received your life's end

So shall we never, evermore, be apart. 

I was told my mother was supposed to come home from her Korea trip today. I'm not sure what time she's supposed to be back but it's pretty late and we haven't heard from her for two days. I know I shouldn't be thinking death upon her. But I have been ill-trained to take captive every thought.

You will find me in the depths of prayer tonight.