Amos the Prophet

An alarming trend is taking place in my morning prayers.

In the past six months I’ve had to move 8 names from our list of the LIVING - "For mercy, life, health, peace, salvation, visitation, forgiveness and remission of sins…" down below to the list of the DEPARTED - "For eternal memory and blessed repose…". Alarming in that I merely noticed it today, and also in that just last evening Navah says to me before I read her bedtime story…”Dad, am I going to die?”

This is one of those situations where you recall yourself saying …”If my kid ever says blank ?”, I’m going to tell them blank!” My response shocked me at first, then I realized that I had an eerie sense of peace about telling her the truth. No candy-coated message about how she’ll never have to worry about death or that when the time comes, Angels will seize her and carry her off into the clouds never feeling the pangs of mortality. Actually…maybe that is the way things will go down when her time comes.

But the peace I had has to do with a very simple truth…I believe in God.

I believe that what He says about himself to be true. That what He says He’ll do, He’ll do. If that - as a believer in Him - I live a life prescribed in the precepts He’s revealed and walk in the way in which He walked, I get eternal life. That’s the payoff. And the payoff far outweighs all the bogus promises of this world and can’t be compared to the life to come.

So when my three-year old asks me if she’ll die someday, I tell her “Yes Navah, you will. And as a child of God you inherit His Kingdom once you’ve passed on from this life to the next. This is our hope. This is our perspective in life. To see all things, including ourselves, as a creation of the Creator and our ultimate reconciliation with Him to be with Him, for eternity, where He intended us to be since the beginning."

At first I was fretful about her question, then I realized the answer that God provides was more for me. To realize the truth of my existence with the death of my loved ones and to understand that those slipping off of the list of the land of the living have received their promise in the Kingdom to come. Lord, have mercy.