Today I had the opportunity to attend the funeral services and burial of Phoenix police officer Travis Murphy. He was shot and killed last week and leaves behind a wife and two small children, ages 2 yrs and 2 weeks. He was 29 and his life was cut short in such a dramatic fashion. At the funeral I got to hear his mother and wife speak along with a friend and religious leaders. I was touched by the power and strength of their testimony in God and in our savior Jesus Christ.
Going to these events and watching these family members bear their feelings to us really has a way of peeling so many layers of crap I have built up and it penetrates my heart. I leave these funerals with more conviction to be a better man and to have a better focus on eternal things and to let go of all the superficial garbage I normally cling to.
Sitting there hearing about a young man with a young family who died doing things I do so often really gets me thinking about my own mortality. It doesn’t scare me in the sense that I don’t want to die but it makes me want to live in such a way that if I do die it can be said of me that I really did live! Funerals remind me that I too will one day face death and that I will never really be ready for it when it comes. The only thing I can do to prepare is to live each day to the fullest, to show greater love, to serve a little more, to listen a little longer. If I am stopped in my prime years and taken back to dwell in the eternities then I want it to be said that I lived well.
These are the feelings that help me get back into an eternal perspective and to strive to live better. I know and have felt today that God does live and that he loves me and that he weeps when we feel so much pain. I also felt that there is hope beyond sorrow and glory beyond pain. Mortality is such a small portion of who we are and who we will become when we consider ourselves to be immortal. I know that because God gave his only begotten Son, I will live forever! That life does not end in death it only marks the end of our mortality but it also is the beginning of our immortal experience. No matter how sharp the pain or how unjust it might feel that ones life is snubbed out to soon, it doesn’t compare to the great satisfaction we will feel when we have all passed through deaths doors and once again congregate together in an eternal place.
I pray that when I die all of you may feel that I have simply moved on before you and that as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, we will be together again. The pain is surely to be felt but it must be accompanied by the hope and reassurance that our lives are already eternal, that God has given us immortality and that eternity is our true home and resting place… we are just visitors here in mortality and we must all return home. What difference does it make in the eternal picture to have left mortality 1, 2, 10, or 20 years before another? What is 100 years when compared to eternity?
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