hillside

Sooner or later we die.

I have no desire to be morbid or maudlin in reminding us all of that. I'm simply stating the inescapable fact of the matter.

By and large we don't like it. We don't take kindly to dying. So most of the time we won't even give it a thought. We hope that by putting it out of our minds we're putting it out of sight. Way beyond the horizon.

But of course it doesn't ever work like that. Sooner or later we die.

The gospel is geared to that. And most of the time in ministering God's Word, the preacher and pastor is either picking up the pieces in the aftermath of death, or building up believers in anticipation of such death.

My first great task is with God's saints: enabling believers not simply to live well but also, more importantly, to die well.

And alongside that, I'm called to go and share with those who've often had but little in the way of any real exposure to the Word of God before bereavement comes, and help them in the anguish of their grief and in the face of death to mourn their loved one well.

I was round seeing a family in mourning today.

It must be over twenty years since first I visited this home. It had been a bereavement then as well - the lady who'd died was a hundred and one when she'd died: and now it was her son-in-law, a man well up in his eighties.

Sooner or later it comes to us all.

In chatting with his widow, herself now twice bereaved, we got to talking about her husband's roots across in Fife. His father (or it might have been his grand-father) had been born in a small little place called Hillside. She smiled when she said that it always looked odd on the forms that you had to fill in -

Place of birth: Hillside.

I smiled, too.

I was thinking of how we are all of us born, perhaps not quite there on the hillside, but certainly down in the valley: what the psalmist describes as the valley of the shadow of death.

We're born there. We live there. And always, each day of our lives, the shadow of death is there.

This lady, like most folk I meet, had largely neglected that shadow. Married for close on sixty years, it came as a shock when her husband died. She hadn't ever really thought it through. She somehow thought it simply wouldn't happen to herself.

She's not, as I say, unusual in that.

When it's not just the shadow, but death itself, which comes barging through the door of a person's life, I'm wanting to give them a sense of the presence of God. A sense that the Lord is at hand, ready and eager to take us into his arms and embrace us to himself in the face of this terrible sorrow.

I'm wanting to give them a sense there's a God who cares. I'm wanting to introduce lost sheep to the loving shepherd.

Sometimes I only get that opportunity when the shadow's become the reality and a person experiences bereavement. But mainly I'm keen to be getting folk ready before that moment comes.

Getting sheep acquainted with the shepherd in good time.

There's a family I'm seeing where the shadow is looming quite large. Death is not much farther down the road. The elderly mother is ill. Seriously so.

For the woman herself, for her family, too, I'm wanting to give them that sense of the presence of God.

So that they're able to travel this path through the valley with him. So that the woman herself may die well. So that her family may tread the rocky path of bereavement well and be able at last to grieve well too.

As well as being my 'place of birth', Hillside is my place of work. The realm of the Shepherd King.