let's do death!

"So let's do death next week!"

An interesting line from the P5 teacher when I looked by the school at coffee time again today. Let's do death. I mean...!!

We were chatting through the teaching there's already been these past three weeks (she said she'd learned a lot herself!) and trying to think ahead to what I'd do next week. Mainly because I thought, the way she'd planned the thing, there was really far too much to try and cover in a 'one-er' next time round.

Baptism, communion, marriage and death. We'll not do it all, I said. Something would have to give. So we'll talk about marriage another time, since the sacraments lead on quite nicely to death. In a manner of speaking!

"So let's do death!"

An interesting line. And one that I've thought on all day. Because it is the way that Jesus lived: and it's how he calls us all to follow him in life.

Doing death. And always in the knowledge that we serve a God of resurrecting power. A God who takes those 'deaths' we 'do' and out of them brings new, abundant life.

It was strange how those words have echoed on throughout the day. As if while at the school God gave those words to me as something of a 'marker' for the day ahead.

A couple of very different folk were in to see me through the day: one in the morning, once I was back from the school; and one in the afternoon.

Both at some length; both facing not quite a crisis, but something of a turning point - a hard, perplexing struggle in their circumstances. And they each in their own different context were struggling to know what to do.

"Let's do death!"

Strange how that line has come back to me all through the day! Because, in effect, that's just what the Lord seemed to say, in pointing the two of them forward and onward to all that his future will hold.

And I have to heed the word myself, of course. I, too, will have to 'do death' in the days that lie ahead. I'm not that sure just what it will entail. Except there'll somehow be a fresh release of resurrecting power.