Ripples in a Pond

I've just been thinking of some friends....friends who are gone.  Sara (Gitzengirl), Vicki (my sweet sweet chat friend)  David, (my first all-the- time chat friend). They are gone.  The loss of them rocked me.  I was intimately involved with David and Vicki as they prepared for their journey into eternity.  These people were critical to me in the past years....and now they are gone.  Gone.  Their lives are like a stone dropped into still water.  There is a ripple of concentric circles....and eventually those ripples fade and there is nothing but the memory of the stone, now resting on the bottom. The internet, once so alive with Sara....with her thoughts, her suffering and then with People celebrating her life and mourning her loss.  Now there is silence.  Her blog is still there, I checked.  Last I knew her Facebook page was still intact also.

When I go, it will be the same.  There will be a ripple of grief.  A ripple of reminiscing.  And then time will pass....and I will be simply, GONE. 

But in the cases of those who knew the Lord, their lives go on, just in a place where we cannot see them.  Sara is right now in Heaven with her Lord.  She is NOT gone....even though people here gradually will stop talking about and thinking of her.  For loss like that there is a bittersweet comfort.  There is the certainty that those people are not lost from the universe....simply are tucked away in another part of it.

How important it is to have a spiritual life begun while we are on this earth....so that we will have something that will continue to contain our spirits after we leave our bodies.  If we do not do that, then at our death, there will be grief, sadness,loss and that person is GONE.  Really gone.  They may go on living in some unfriendly environment such as hell but as far as having contact with others...they will no more.  They are on their own in a lonely place of suffering never to be seen again.

When I just visited Sara's blog, it was quiet.  Her personality and the specialness of her being is no longer there . It is a vacant house,filled with words and thoughts like old belongings left behind.  But as I thought about her, I realized she still IS.  Her spirit is in heaven.  And it is filling the skies with her sweetness.  I want to be like that.   I know that I will not be mourned like Sara was when I go...but there are those who will grieve.I want them to know that I am not GONE. I'm merely elsewhere.

I don't know why I'm thinking of death today.  Maybe because of the decision I have to make today about the medicines.  Or maybe just because I got to looking for some people who are gone.  I'm missing my old friends. I pray we will one day meet again.  My friends.  Your concentric ripples are fading.  Becoming more faint.  Soon they will cease altogether.  But I pray your spirits are kept safe in the hands of Jesus.  I pray I will meet you again and we will hug and laugh and reminisce.