Our dear friend, Matt Mockabee saw Jesus face to face Saturday evening. He didn't make it through the emergency brain surgery due to heat exhaustion. He was 26 years old and had enjoyed only three months of marriage. It all happened within two days. Two days, and everything has changed.

Sarah was right on her post when she said it's getting harder and harder to feel anything anymore. We hear bad news and we're all on the phones back and forth with one another, hoping the best but expecting the worst. In the last five years, so many of our friends have died and the loss has affected each of us in it's own way. There has been definite damage to the psyche. The first thing out of everyone's mouth when they pick up the phone is: Is he dead?

So many young deaths, so many too early deaths...

Brock was 23, Aaron was18, Robert Hopper was newly married, Kathy (Aaron's mother) died of cancer leaving her husband without a wife and without their only son; Patty Parker collapsed, she was only in her forties, losing grandparents, and now Matt...

It's not God that's not fair, it's Life. God is in us, not the thing that is hurting us. The cross solidified that it was Life that would throw us the blows. Even Jesus was up against the truth that He would have to endure unbearable strife.

I tried to listen to the songs of redemption on the way to work this morning, but they all just fell flat. We're all spinning our little cocoon. The funeral is tomorrow at 1:00. Walking into our church with the band playing that dreadful music, can I handle it?

We have five friends coming into town and staying with us. It will be good to see them, to share these battle scars once again. To be together before we go back to our own worlds with one less in number.

Pray for strength, pray for peace, pray for sufficiency.

Show me a place where hope is young,
And a people.. who are not afraid to love..

This world has nothing for me,
And this world has everything.

All that I could want and nothing that I need.

Now I'm waking up, now I'm breaking up, now I'm making up--for lost time..

posted by Kelly @ 8:58:00 AM