I attended a funeral and the nave was packed. The whole church was for that matter. So I took up a place at the nave door with the ushers to listen to the service. As I stood there, I became intensely aware of "looking in on the celebration of a life." Once outside, I looked down on the funeral tent and people huddled there. It was like one of those near death experiences --except this one was "NEAR life"--really near the LIFE of a beloved person. We catch sight of all of our life's, short-lived, rich in eternal meaning.
It was Graham Greene who wrote the novel, The Tenth Man, with the condemned prisoner who sells his life for a million dollars--for somebody else to die for him. He leaves the jail cell, the other person dies and his family inherits the other man's wealth, estate--everything! So, the prisoner who has bought himself out of life faces the torment of having lost everything. He sneaks around and looks "in on his life," as it was--visits his home, watches the other people living there. He is utterly lost and knows not the real meaning and value in his life.
Looking in on that funeral....
I caught the intangibles of what really matters in life, the gifts you have truly left behind that keep on giving. M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, said that real love is when we enrich the lives of others. He defined "enrich" as enabling them to find more of who they really are. Strange how the true beauty of the one who had died enriched so many ... and I looking in on it all from the outside caught a glimpse of those "immeasurable riches of Christ."(Ephesians 2:7)
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