In their absence we experience loss, grief, questions,
desires to speak with them, to see them, to have them experience more life with
us. My thoughts flit and float between memories, desires, emotions, and
questions. Emerging from all of these is a desire to be
proactive in honoring them. I want to pull on the wealth of their contributions
to me and live it to the fullest.
A common saying in the Church today is to make one person’s
ceiling another person’s floor. To take all that is learned and gained from the
life we are honoring, whether they have gone on before us or not, and use it as
a launching point to go farther. If they accessed 10% of the treasures of
heaven, go for 30% so that the next person can launch from 30% towards 50%. In
honoring, we take our spiritual inheritance and we expand it throughout our
lifetime so that the inheritance we give is greater than the one we received.
This is true stewardship.
This may seem impossible when the life was lived so fully.
But I think that those we are missing would want us not to set their level of
maturity in Christ as our goal. Instead they would want us to believe that that
has already been deposited into us by them so that we could go so much farther.
Every father or mother wants their child to go beyond them, and we honor them
by doing so.
The key is that we do not do so by our own strength for we
will wear ourselves out in a week if not sooner. Our strength comes from the
same source as their strength, and that is in Christ. We go farther by resting
in Christ. We live by the strength of Christ in us, not by our flesh, but by
His Spirit. We find our hope, our joy, and our peace in Christ for this is how
we honor those who have gone before us.
In so doing, I want to be careful to not determine truth by
experiences, but to view experiences through the lens of truth, which are the
eyes of Jesus. Jesus told us we are to pray that the reality of heaven be made
present upon the earth. That is the mission of the Christian life to bring
heaven to earth. Thus, I want to walk in boldness to not set those experiences
as a stopping point, but instead a launching pad to grab hold of those truths
of heaven and pull them to earth.
In the spirit of honoring, I want to go after healing more.
I don’t have the answers as to why healing doesn't happen sometimes, but I do
know that in Jesus I can find the keys to the Kingdom. I will trust in the
goodness of God. I will remember that for the believer, death is swallowed up
in victory. I will remember the lives lived and the lessons learned, but I will
not memorialize them into the past, but pull them with me into my future as I
grow in Christ. Those I influence, those I lead, those I teach will be learning
also from those I learned from as I honor them by continuing to move forward.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of
witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily
entangles. And let us run with
perseverance the race
marked out for us, fixing our
eyes on Jesus, the
pioneer and perfecter of faith. Hebrews 12:1-2a
This post is in honor of:
