Recently, in the midst of publishing two new novels, I have been doing genealogical research on my own family. I took the DNA test from Ancestry. com and since I had already developed my family tree, I found loads of new relatives who belong to it as well.
But you don’t have to research to know that there are many who have gone before each of us, or that our lives today are built by the struggles of others who deserve our respect.
Some of them led hard lives, filled with sorrows we can only imagine. Others seem to have led uneventful lives–and yet if we look more closely, these related people are important links to us, to our personalities, to our inherited strengths and weaknesses.
This is all God’s magnificent plan. This is a plan without time or space, or whininess and ridicule for others in the time we are on Earth. For we are all wanderers through life–and our life is a short one! We will all have our Good Friday’s. But we will all have our Easter, too–just as those who went before us.
So, how are we making the best of our time here? Do we see ourselves as part of the divine, or not?
Many of us live as if we will live forever, not giving much thought to death. Others overthink death, worried about what it actually means. But in the big picture, death is not death at all, but only a crossing, only one more step into the divine for which each of us is made.
Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery: We all shall not sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. Death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law: but thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.–Isaiah 50:1-2
Translating a World on the Edge 