John Murray on Our Hope in the Face of Death

The following is an except from a letter written by John Murray to Valerie Knowlton, the woman who would eventually become his wife, on the occasion of her grandmother's death:

How real is death, and how dismal except as its darkness is illumined by the hope of resurrection to life! It is as we look death squarely in the face that the grace and power of the Savior take on new meaning. How tawdry are all human attempts to dress it up! The light and faith of Jesus alone can cast a halo of joy and hope around it. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, and only they! There is nothing that any person can place between himself or herself and the damnation that sin demands, but the merit, blood, righteousness, mediatorship, and intercession of the risen and glorified Redeemer.

--Taken from The Life of John Murray, Iain Murray 

The Earthly End of a Life Well Lived

The Earthly End of a Life Well Lived
Justin Wainscott

For Bobby Newton

The earthly end
of a life well lived
should, in my opinion,
be marked by
both tears and smiles.

Indeed, one mark of a
beloved man must surely be
that the sounds heard
at his funeral are a mixture
of crying and laughing.

Crying, because he will
most certainly be missed.
And laughing, because he is
remembered so fondly.

I know that's why
I've shed tears today.
But it's also why I'm smiling,
even as I wipe away the tears.

So farewell, my friend,
until we meet again
in that place where all our crying
will be turned into laughing.

My Last Poem of 2013

Strangely Familiar
M. Justin Wainscott, 2013

If I must die, and die I must,
son of Adam that I am,
and if my death is not
untimely or unexpected,
then, if it can be arranged,
and it's not too much trouble,
let it be in a familiar place,
surrounded by familiar people,
singing familiar hymns,
and reading familiar promises
from that most familiar of Books;
because, though I've never been there,
I believe I'll find the Celestial City
somehow strangely familiar.

The Pain of Loss

The Rejected Husband
Wendell Berry, Given: Poems

After the storm and the new
stillness of the snow, he returns
to the graveyard, as though
he might lift the white coverlet,
slip in beside her as he used to do,
and again feel, beneath his hand,
her flesh quicken and turn warm.
But he is not her husband now.
To participate in resurrection, one
first must be dead. And he goes
back into the whitened world, alive.

Sometimes, Silence Is Best

The following quote is from a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his seminary students, upon the news that one of their colleagues had been killed in the first three days of Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939. It is wise counsel for all of us when we face circumstances in which we cannot make sense of the seemingly senseless suffering and death of those close to us.

Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words. They should remain open. Our only comfort is the God of the resurrection, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ....

--Quoted in Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Eric Metaxas

John Murray on Death

The following is an except from a letter written by John Murray to Valerie Knowlton, the woman who would eventually become his wife, on the occasion of her grandmother's death:

How real is death, and how dismal except as its darkness is illumined by the hope of resurrection to life! It is as we look death squarely in the face that the grace and power of the Savior take on new meaning. How tawdry are all human attempts to dress it up! The light and faith of Jesus alone can cast a halo of joy and hope around it. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, and only they! There is nothing that any person can place between himself or herself and the damnation that sin demands, but the merit, blood, righteousness, mediatorship, and intercession of the risen and glorified Redeemer.

--Taken from The Life of John Murray, Iain Murray