“The closer you live to God, the smaller everything else appears.”
–Purpose Driven Life (Pg: 37)

I went to the funeral for a 3-year-old girl the other day.

She died from cancer in her daddy’s arms.



I sat in the front row across from her parents, sister, brother and weeping family.

It was a tragic and painful hour and a half.



The look in her father’s eyes was hauntingly blank, dazed, numb…absent.

The look of life had been drained away by death’s suffocating kiss.

She was a little ballerina they said, a princess who danced in tiny ruby colored shoes.

There was no dancing that day. It was awkwardly quiet, strangely frozen.

We didn’t know how to act, what to say, how to feel.

Most I am sure, felt the same urgency I felt, to get home and hug on my own little ones.

God is frighteningly close in death.

His presence is like a plunge in an icy river.

The sudden cold is an electrifying shock of reality. Everything comes alive, suddenly only one thing matters, only one purpose screams in your head…GET OUT!

Death pries open your slumbering eyes, it slaps you in the face, and it throws you in the river.

Like the frantic scrambling of one trying to get out of freezing water, so one’s vision is instantly refocused in the stunning light of death.

All of a sudden you become a sage, a Solomon or Solomons. With the force of scorpion’s sting out of know where, you become aware of what is most important.

Death has a sting…the sting of love.

Death forces you into the arms of those you love. It is here that God is found in death.

Where love is born out of senseless tragedy.

Everything becomes real simple, everything else becomes so very small, compared to the priority of loving those you love.

The first thing I did as I rushed home, the only thing I could think of…was love.

Death ended the embrace of one father but multiplied embraces in a hundred homes.

Everything got smaller that day…that happens when God shows up.