by Kevin Burton
I called the cemetery where my mother will be buried next week and told the clerk that the time had come.
The clerk was actually en route to work. She said she would look up our family’s records once she got there, and call me back.
“Everything is paid up,” the clerk said after she called me back in half an hour or so. “All I need is a signature at some point, permission to bury her.”
Making funeral arrangements for a close relative is never, never easy. It’s unpleasant, any way you slice it.
What string of syllables may I put together for you today friends, to urge you to do this ahead of time, way ahead of time if you can. Prepay for funerals. Figure it out. Make it happen at a time when you’re not deep in the throes of grief and anguish.
Same situation with the mortuary. Prepaid. My wife’s family has also taken care of things beforehand for Jeannette’s mother.
There isn’t going to be a time when you feel like taking care of funeral arrangements. You have to be intentional. This is you defining love, not as some funny feeling in your stomach, but as taking responsibility to do the right thing by your loved ones.
Now before you construct too many praises for Jeannette and me for astute preparation, let it be known that we have not done the funeral planning for each other. This is a good time to make that happen, while it is (unfortunately) at the front of our minds.
I mentioned the prepay thing to the Hospice Social worker who called me to offer condolences (and support for the next 13 months).
“I try to tell people the same thing,” she said. “I’ve been called all kinds of nasty names for talking about it. I’ve had people tell me I am just being morbid.”
That’s just silliness, the stuff of donkey ears.
But I can think of a much greater foolishness.
Someday you will draw your last breath as a mortal human. Your entrance into Heaven and eternity with God has been prepaid for you. But you have to go to Jesus, receive Him as Savior, to receive it.
The Bible says there is a Heaven and a Hell, no other options, and no second chances once you die.
If you have to plan and pay for a funeral you have not prepared for, that’s not good. But you can stumble through that. I mean you must do something. You have no choice. You will get something done.
You will say “I wish I had done this earlier, but OK, now what do I need to do?”
But you can not stumble through death without Jesus and come out on the right side of things. You won’t have a chance to express regrets, but then make things right. You will wake up in hell with no remedy, your mental and physical pain throughout all eternity, heightened by the fact that this did not have to be.
Here’s a somewhat clunky, King James word for you: propitiation. Jesus Christ paid the price for your sins on a Roman cross. God the Father made Him the substitute, to take your punishment upon Himself.
I found the word propitiation used three times in the Bible:
“Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” (Romans 3:25 KJV).
“And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (I John 2:2 KJV).
“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10 KJV).
God doesn’t send anybody to hell, by the way. To get to hell you have to aggressively step over God’s mercy. You have to actively ignore it, year after year, until one day it is too late.
Prepaid by Jesus, my friend, is the only way to go.
Page 7 