Tuesday, February 15
Love is strong as death.
—Song of Solomon 8:6
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing funerals across the years of my ministry, it’s that love both transcends and carries us through the experience of death. It carries us through our own deaths as well as the deaths of those we love.
We come together at a funeral and share our love…our love for each other, our love for the deceased, our love for God who promises that there is something beyond even this.
Try though it might, death can’t muscle out love. Call me weird, but I have continued to feel my father’s love for me, though he’s been dead 25 years. While the separation is terribly hard, it doesn’t hold the trump card. It cannot steal the love.
And so I find myself working much harder to increase love in my life. It’s the resource I will need in the hard days, in the days of separation. Learning to love is like lifting weights—it is making me strong enough to meet the challenge of death.
Whether I am the one leaving this earth or whether it is someone else, the challenge and the promise are the same. We fear that the separation will take our love. Not so, says the wise Solomon. Love is death’s equal. The Gospel will then build on this and say that love is, in fact, the victor.
Carry us through, God, in the strength of your love. Amen.
These Signposts originally appeared on explorefaith in 2006.
