This is an entry from two weeks before Christmas that I posted on a different blog

Returning from Ethan’s 6 month checkup. As I drop off Ryan at work at the Labor and Industry building I see obvious signs of a funeral across the street a hearse (and I hope I’m wrong but I thought I saw two long cars) and a bunch of people dressed up. I think a measly “that’s too bad” and keep driving. Then I see a car that is just sitting in the opposite lane, going nowhere. I’m thinking “what are you doing? You’re going to block traffic”. And as I drive by I see she is wiping tears away, literally too distraught to drive.

Then it hits. Death sucks. It just plain sucks. We get numbed to it, unless it includes us, because it happens all around us and we are desensitized. God never intended this for us. He knew it would happen but that was never his intent or desire. He also knew that creating us would cost and wound him dearly for, as he was creating everything, he was also sacrificing his own son… A part of himself would die.

Yet we were made, he did come, and he did die. For us. Which reminds me, without Jesus there is no Christmas, and without Christmas there is no Easter. And without Easter there is no hope; no life. I only hope that the recently deceased was a believer and had accepted Jesus in his heart.

He (Jesus) is the only hope we have, and is a loving gracious healing God. He is the “reason for the season”.  Christmas and Easter are more than “one gives you presents, the other candy”. The two are interconnected, inseparable from each other. The story of hope is incomplete with out the other and how sad it is that our country today has brought them down to a “me me me”, self serving, and greedy level.

