prepared

More loss today.

Two more homes and sets of families where grief now grows.

The local crematorium is busier than it's been for a while. It's over a week away now before there are spaces in their schedule.

I was round to see the folk who've been bereaved.

"No one ever thinks it'll happen to them." They're shaking their heads in the midst of their tears and trying in vain to come to terms with the dreadful, stark finality of it all.

It's odd to hear these words again. Almost exactly the same sort of thing was being said by someone else when I called on them through the course of yesterday.

No one ever thinks it will happen to them.

But it does, of course. It happens to us all.

Sometime. Somehow. Somewhere. Someone.

We don't get to know in advance the details of it all. I'm not even sure it would help that much if we did.

But it happens. The tsunami of grief comes crashing up the shoreline of our lives and swamps our hearts with utter desolation.

There's a need to be prepared. The Scout motto. It needs to be translated onto the broadest canvas of all.

It's striking to see how often it was that Jesus took this line. Be prepared. Watch.

You don't know when the Lord will come. So be prepared.

He wept over Jerusalem. "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace - but now it is hidden from your eyes." Too late.

They weren't prepared. They didn't think.

In some ways, I see, my calling, in preaching the Word of God, is firstly to get folk prepared.

Bereavement will come. Death will knock at their door. One day we all will die.

Of course, we don't really like to think on these things. But if failing to think leaves us unprepared, then that failure is folly itself.

As Jesus himself best put it - "If you had only known what would bring you peace ..."