Good Friday Musing (Peter Brown)
I've
played music at dozens of funerals and the experience of watching
dozens of lives memorialized has brought me to this realization: Life makes more sense
looking at it from the funeral backwards than from the womb going
forward. Like
one of those difficult mazes that is suddenly too easy when you start at
the "Finish"
and solve it backwards to the "Start," our short journey here is a
confusing
puzzle filled with amusing creature-comfort distractions and diversions
at
every junction; however, it becomes suddenly simpler when we stay
focused on our passing
from the end of this story to whatever lies ahead. What
legacy will we leave behind? How should we have
lived to make the absolute
most out of our short time on this planet?
A
peasant carpenter named Jesus spent his whole life
preparing for the death we memorialize today and it made him radically
others-centered. He wasn't
terribly famous at the time, and in
2-4 years of selfless living, he started a trend that caught on in ways
that none
of his contemporaries could ever have predicted.
What
about us? What will
have mattered most on our own personal Good Friday, when we face death? And what do we need to change now to break free from
the clutter and make the most of
our short burst here? What's worth living for now? And what really
won't matter as we approach the finish line?
A
decision we almost certainly won't regret, I've always felt, is to make a
decision to save and / or improve as many lives as possible on the way
through.
Blessings in this Easter season!
|
