Loss and Legacy

I am learning the gift of a legacy. Legacies have been given to me all my life, but I guess I haven’t really understood their worth until the one giving it to me has died. When death happens, most of me wants to beat the ground and scream to the heavens that they don’t know what they are doing up there and are only out to get me. I wallow in the “what ifs” and “if onlys” for what seems like a lifetime, until I can finally consider that maybe this was “God’s will.”

But, was it? Did he ever intend death? In his perfect beginning, when all creation stood naked before him did death even exist? Did he ever intend love to be separated? Could my grief be even a fraction of what God felt the day Adam and Eve took a bite from that juicy piece of fruit? The Lord watched as his creation abandoned their trust in him for only a few moments costing them a lifetime of separation from the physical presents of their creator, costing countless their eternity.

The Lord’s original plan had to be rewritten with death in the picture. The earth had to become a battleground rather than a utopia.

But there must be something significant to these unbearable emotions that He would let us feel them, right? Such strong emotion, that if pressed into with fervency could make you sweat blood! Even the giver of life, who came down in the flesh, wept for the loss of Lazarus, when he knew he’d see him again in Heaven, and at a simple command would raise his friend to new life again.

We try to pat dry our tears, find something to make us happy, or feel better about ourselves so that we don’t have to face the unnatural part of life. Maybe it is because we know if we give into those tears that we just might see how inadequate we are, and we don’t know when the tears will stop. That if we submit to the sorrow we’ll see that we aren’t in control, and that we never were.

As long as we are stuck in this mindset we won’t know Christ as our hope. In our fallen state, we have been reconciled to God by the blood of Jesus. Where once death could separate us it no longer can! The death of Christ is symbolic of every child of God’s death. God saw our mess and picked it up for us and he is recruiting us to help bring back his original plan.