Living or Dying

Excerpt from A Prayer in A Service of Death and Resurrection —

“…Help us to live as those who are prepared to die. 

And when our days here are accomplished, 

enable us to die as those who go forth to live….”

I’ve been using our current United Methodist Book of Hymns since before it was published (great story, ask me sometime), but recently those lines have been grabbing my attention in a fresh way.

This is not some wild announcement I’m making here.  As I love to say, I have no plans to either die or retire.

But those those lines resonate for some reason.  Perhaps in part because they echo a hymn that says, “When we are living, it is in Christ Jesus; and when we’re dying, it is in the Lord.  Both in our living, and in our dying, we belong to God.”

We do.

By the grace of God, we really do.

Somebody say Amen.