LIFE IS SHORT; LIVE DEEP.

Monday, July 20, about 7am, the phone rang at our house. That’s a bit early, so it occurred to me that it might be bad news. It certainly was. Henry and Kathy, two of our dearest friends, were calling from Calgary to tell us that their eldest child, Arthur, had died the previous evening in a motorcycle accident. Though clearly devastated, they were relatively calm as they shared the details that they knew. God sustains his vulnerable children in times like these, comforting all who will receive his comfort, and providing the body’s natural shock response regardless. People generally function remarkably well in a crisis, doing what needs to be done immediately, and falling apart when the time is right. God is good.

All who knew and loved Arthur struggle to answer that age old question, “Why?”. The details of the accident help clarify what happened, but that’s “How?”, a much different question. “How?” is simple, and yields to investigation, eyewitness accounts, measurement. It’s physics and biology. And it’s very useful, revealing truths that are immediately transferable to all similar events. “Why?”, on the other hand, is something deeper, personal, mysterious. It concerns this one particular event, this life, this story, and its intersection with other stories, our stories, the story.

The loss of Arthur has ruptured the stories of all who loved him. For his wife, his parents, his sisters, it’s a monstrous wound, so cataclysmic that, for a while, their stories will lose focus and it will seem as though they’ll never quite make sense again. For his close friends and colleagues it will disrupt a major portion of their story. A character is suddenly missing; a character who had an important part to play. An element is gone, and the impact of this change is yet unclear. And for those of us who saw him only occasionally, our stories too are torn, both by the loss of Arthur and by the devastation in the lives of those who’s stories intersect ours more deeply or directly.

Arthur was a beautiful young man. When he was two years old, as I recall, he was a shy, retiring little guy, but as he grew he began to engage life in surprising ways. He cut lawns for spending money, as many kids do, but soon turned this activity into an independent business. He overcame his natural shyness to become a successful real estate agent. He loved people, and was generous with both time and money. And then there was the quality I enjoyed most about him, he asked questions; questions about life, and God, and death, and purpose. And he asked questions about the answers he got. In short, Arthur was one of these people who engage life deeply and, in the process, deepen all the lives around them.

And so I offer, as pastors often do, a benediction – a Latin word that simply means good word. A word about Arthur; a word about life.

Benediction

Today the searing pain of loss still fills our hearts.

But as the pain subsides, and mists of sorrow lift,

new vistas will appear.

And his brief life will sparkle once again in our brief lives.

And we will see that lives, all lives, are brief.

But, some are full of living.

And lives that are lived fully, are lived well.