There is something strange about death. It just doesn’t fit.

No matter how prepared one might try to be to accommodate it, it still doesn’t fit in seamlessly into the schedule, as it were, of living.

I’ve concluded that death doesn’t fit in because it doesn’t belong.

I’m professionally acquainted with death and dying. Death has also encroached into my space personally. No matter how much warning I get, no matter the length of time cushioned into the prognosis, it is still a shock to the system, a noticeable ache, a lingering void.

I would think that as one providing chaplain support to the grieving it would get easier. It doesn’t. A longing for eternity leaves its imprint at every end of life scene I’ve attended to in my career.

1 Timothy 6:12 tells me that God has called me to eternity.

Eternity seems to be calling me, too. No wonder I cannot easily shake off the longing, or flippantly become accustomed to death — the temporary glitch to forever. Death wants to assert a permanence, but I will instead lay hold to the permanence of God’s call to eternity.