The prospect of death has been a recurring theme in my thoughts recently. On car rides, at work, at family get-togethers and fast food restaurants, it appears like a constant hum of background noise, ever-present, amplified in silence.
Christmas may seem like a strange time to be contemplating mortality, but to me it seems fitting that I should be preoccupied with the season and its eternal implications.
Not in a particularly morbid way. More in an existential way.
I think about death like the end of the Lord of the Rings, when the elves make their final departure from the Grey Havens in Middle Earth, with its epic landscape and many perils, and return to the land of their origin.
Death doesn’t scare me. It never has. And I have Jesus to thank for that.
The Jesus who came to Bethlehem two thousand years ago is the same Jesus who eventually died on the cross and rose again three days later. Because of Christmas, death has no power over my eternal soul. I don’t have to fear the future, because I know where I’ll be going when I die.
I’ll be going home.
Homecoming
The road meets its end on cloud-ringed shores,
weary for wandering long
over hill and under,
spreading in stone tributaries across land
like veins through a petal,
laced with light and shadow.
Brick and stone sit resigned,
scorched and crumbling,
studded with frost,
competing for space
among the many stories that sprout like tough,
unruly grasses
from every groove and crease in a face
whose eyes, rimmed by serendipitous flowers,
share roots with ancient trees.
When at last the road finds its edge
dulled by the lullaby of patient waves,
the sun hangs low beneath rings of cloud,
golden film transforming the weight of years
to sails caught in the breeze,
feather-light,
drawn by a long-lost memory of song
just beyond the horizon.
