When you are young you don’t notice pain much unless it is a bee sting or a wasp sting. Falls and scrapes go unnoticed because you just bounce back from it and move on. When you get a few decades counted in your birthday roster, those falls and scrapes and other inconveniences hurt more. Not just because of your age but because your body doesn’t heal as easily as it did when you were young.
You will hear some people say “I don’t bounce like I used to”, and in a true sense, we don’t bounce at all. Most of us land pretty hard regardless of the surface we land on. So, why am I talking about this today? Because when you are young, you don’t think about getting older. It’s not a priority at the time. It is in the future and it hasn’t happened yet, so it isn’t important.
God created us to have a relationship with Him but for a portion of our lives, we try to fill that “empty place” with all kinds of things and people who don’t belong in that spot. Only God belongs there. God made a way for us to know Him and to be with Him into eternity and that is by having a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ. Your belief in His redemptive work on the cross and His resurrection is the only way to have this relationship. You can’t work your way into it or buy your way into it. It is God’s gift to you through Jesus.
We can medicate our pains in this life and you can do lots of good things if you have the means to do so but your salvation only comes through belief in Jesus Christ.
Ruth became one of those in the bloodline of Jesus.
Many times in our lives we get blind-sided by the news of a friend’s death or of a sudden death in our immediate family and we don’t know how to handle it. We must seek Jesus in our grief and let Him have the pain and the suffering. It sounds easy but it isn’t, particularly at the time of the loss. Why am I bringing this up today? Because, yesterday was the fourth anniversary of my Dachshund, Trixie, passing away and I need to write about it.
The months after her death were hard because she was only a month or two from her 15th birthday. It happened during the first months of COVID so we couldn’t be in the office with her which hurt. It felt like losing a child because it was so sudden. One of the girls came to the door and told us we needed to come in quickly. They had taken an x-ray of her and she had an enlarged heart and by the time we got inside, she was taking her last breath. Even four years after the event just thinking about it hurts.
Grief doesn’t go away. Time may help eventually but grief and the pain of loss never really go away. We must give those feelings to Jesus and let Him help us with them. God knows the pain and the feelings that we have when a beloved family member dies and we have to trust Him in the pain so we can move through it one day at a time.
The Living Message of Christ 