When Carolyn Arends\u2019 father lay dying in the hospital, an oxygen mask made it virtually impossible for him to communicate with his family. So they were surprised to hear him humming an old Sunday school song: \u2018With Christ in the vessel we can smile at the storm, as we go sailing home.\u2019 <\/p>\n
Just hours before he went home to Heaven, a boyhood chorus he had learned sixty years ago gave this dying man comfort and strength. Arends writes: \u2018I hope I go down singing, speaking, and thinking about Jesus\u2026 Death unaddressed is the bogeyman in the basement; it keeps us looking over our shoulders and from entering joyously into the days we\u2019ve been given. Dragged out of the shadows and held up to the light of the Gospel, death not only loses its sting, it becomes a reminder to \u201cuse wisely all the time we have\u201d<\/i> (see\u00a0Psalm\u00a090:12\u00a0CEV<\/sup>)\u2026 A race toward the finish line has a different sense of purpose and urgency than a jog around the block. When a believer acknowledges he\u2019s headed toward death [tomorrow or in 50 years], he or she can stop expending the tremendous energy it takes to deny his mortality and start living into his eternal destiny here and now. He can be intentional about investing in the things he wants to be with him at the end\u2026 Death hurts, but it\u2019s not the end\u2026 we don\u2019t mourn as those who have no hope\u2026 I don\u2019t know how many days I\u2019ve got left, but I want to use every one to get the truth about who Jesus is\u2014and who I am in Him\u2014more deeply ingrained.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Carolyn Arends\u2019 father lay dying in the hospital, an oxygen mask made it virtually impossible for him to communicate with his family. So they were surprised to hear him humming an old Sunday school song: \u2018With Christ in the vessel we can smile at the storm, as we go sailing home.\u2019 Just hours before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}