Have you recently experienced the death of someone special?
May these words speak to your heart
as you cope with your new realities.
 
When someone graduates, we usually celebrate.
We throw a party. We congratulate them.
We give them gifts.
 
But when someone close to us graduates to Heaven, we are sad.
We realize they won’t be coming back for Christmas break.
They won’t stop in for a weekend.
​We can’t call or message them.
Zoom won’t reach to where they’ve gone.
 
And so we’re sad. Even Jesus understood that emotion.
He cried – not for the dead, but for the living.
He knew how much Martha and Mary missed their brother,
particularly in an era when women’s economic options
were severely limited. Jesus wept, even though He knew
how soon He was going to change the situation.
 
We doubt seriously that He’s going to duplicate that action
for your loved one this afternoon. Yet for those who believed
in the God of the Bible, we have been told by Jesus Himself
that a graduation to Heaven is indeed a promotion
to a much better state of being. They don’t hurt any more.
They aren’t restricted by time and space, as we know them.
And they get to see God when they talk to Him.
 
And so we thank the Lord for having let them be a part of our lives
for so long. We thank Him for all the great memories we shared
while they were among us. We thank Him for all the times
we were able to serve Him together.
 
Many of our graduating friends and family were pillars
of both church and community.
They will be greatly missed for a long time.
​It will be strange to plan regular events and not have their input.
We’ve always just depended on them to be there helping out.
They believed. They also served.
Those are some good memories for you to hang onto.
 
May the Lord give you strength, wisdom, and peace
as you recall those remembrances
and pass them along to your kids.
They indeed have a Godly heritage.

​Have you ever wondered why a circle is 360 degrees? Especially in the metric system, wouldn’t 100 or 1000 be more fitting? Then a right angle would be 25 or 250, which in that system are nice round numbers.
 
Could it be that the designation of 360 might have been derived from something found in the created world? Might it have taken just that long, in the original, for the earth to make one trip around the sun? After all, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says everything is slowing down (becoming more random and less useful), so if a planet in orbit is slowing, taking longer to get around, that would mean the years would get longer.
 
Genesis 5:5 tells us that Adam lived to be 930 (in Creation years).  But if we convert that to days and work backwards, we discover that if Adam had lived in our time (and wasn’t subject to our germs, viruses, diseases, and accidents), he would have only made 916 or 917 trips around the sun. To put it another way, in our day he would only have celebrated 916 birthdays, while living the same number of days.
 
Using that same theory, and the same proportions, what would happen to the length of a day? At Creation, God defined a day as “evening and morning,” Genesis 1:5, thus one rotation of the earth on its axis. Slowing that process down would have meant originally the earth moved faster, making each day have fewer “now minutes.” Doing the calculations, it appears the days of Creation week would have measured, each, using a modern stop watch, at just a smidge over 23.6 hours.
 
It’s something to ponder, when you can’t go to sleep!
 
(I’m not a scientist. I just like to ponder what it was like, in the original. What do you think?)