The Farside Banks of Jordan

2025 has been a rough year.

Among other things, I’ve attended too many funerals.  A precious little boy.  A loving sister-in-law.  Today, a treasured friend.

There is a sadness, a void, even an anger that we mere humans have when we lose someone we love.  Let’s be honest.  It’s extremely hard to see past those feelings to the eternal picture.  But at each of these services, full of tears because of our loss, the messages were not fully centered around the person we loved and lost.  

The center was Jesus.  At each one.  And there is hope in that for me. 

Hope that in the sorrow, we have Someone to cling to, to cry with, to shout our anger to.  Someone that will always love us no matter what we are feeling.  Or doing.  Or for how long.  Someone that offers forgiveness for all of the stupid things we do or say and the ability to change and do better.  Someone that is reaching out to us to come closer, to move in, to take hold of all of the promises.  Someone that is willing us to do good, to be good, to extend His hands and feet to those around us.  Someone that is asking us to live life like each of those I am remembering:  completely, joyfully, lovingly, humbly, compassionately, generously.  Someone that is asking us to keep planting those flowers so He can make them grow.

I was so blessed to have worked with my friend for the first 16 of the past 18 years.  Her absence at the office over the past 2 years has been immense.  Her absence now is even greater.  But I am clinging to the promises that she and I both believe and one day, I pray, she will greet me again with her contagious smile and her strong, loving arms.

I imagine her standing next to my loving sister-in-law; both looking over their shoulder watching that precious little boy run through the fields of flowers just beyond.  Behind them there’s a long line of people that I love waiting to welcome me home … there on the Farside Banks of Jordan.

Tonight, I will mourn a little longer.  But tomorrow, God willing, the sun will rise again, and peek out from behind the clouds, bringing Light into our darkness and color to our gray world, and I will try again to live like my friend, my sister-in-law, and that little boy … to live like Christ.

Philippians 2:1-7
2 Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, ² then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. ³ Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, ⁴ not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
⁶ Who, being in very nature^[a] God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
⁷ rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature^[b] of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.