Upper Room | Devotional

Upper Room | Devotional

11-02-10
At the Border

Read 1 Corinthians 13:8-13

Love never ends.

-1 Corinthians 13:8 (NRSV)
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LAST Monday the 31-year-old son of a church colleague died at the end of a six-month battle with cancer. He and his wife have a two-month-old son. What can I say as a pastor at times like this? What could any of us say? Theologian and father Karl Barth offers some help. Standing at the grave of his 20-year-old son, Barth seized on the apostle Paul's words now and then in First Corinthians 13. These two words define the boundary between this life and the life to come.


We stood at that painful border Monday morning. The doctors had done their best; cancer had done its worst. There are so many questions we want to ask, don't know how to ask, or are afraid to ask. Paul acknowledges that in this life we don't have all the answers.


Our hope is in the promise of then. On the other side of resurrection, we will see God face to face. Then we will understand fully, even as we have been fully understood by God. Now we see dimly; then we will see face to face. Now we know in part; then we will know fully. In times of grief, three essential qualities link our now with God's then: Faith. Hope. Love. And the greatest — the gift that crosses the boundary between this life and the life to come — is love. May God's love be made real in us for those around us now, as a taste of then.

James A. Harnish (Florida, USA)

O God, help us entrust all our unanswered and unanswerable questions to your amazing love. Amen.

Love is stronger than death.

Parents whose child has died recently