death on Lack of Control

I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick. He was a man about fifty-three years old who had lived a very active, useful, faithful, creative life. Actually, he was a social activist who had car...

We live in a death-denying world that seems determined to develop technologies that will enable us to get out of life alive. Yet the more we strive to be free of death the more we are shaped by the de...

The problem with death is absence.

Fear and restlessness kill more than do illnesses.

Almighty God, we too often live in fear. Fear drives our self-preservation, our self-centered decisions, and prevents us from comprehending the wonder of your presence among us. Like Peter, we would d...

Jerry Sittser, who experienced the terrible tragedy of losing a mother, a wife, and a daughter in the same car accident, wrote these poignant words on loss: Loss creates a barren present, as if on...

In Four Quartets , T. S. Eliot writes that “any action is a step to the block.” He means that our actions always draw us closer to death, and in that sense every action we take is a wager of our ...

Death spreads its poison through everything we enjoy because nothing we enjoy is ours to keep. Time passes, things change, and eventually everyone loses everything they love

Eternal and Generous God, Every good gift comes from You. Your generosity is expressed best Through Jesus, the Crucified and Risen One, Who gave Himself for us. We acknowledge we often doubt Your will...

Gracious God, we are called to be a joyful people, giving thanks for You and Your good gifts. There are times, however, when sin and sorrow grow, pushing joy to the side. We lose sight of Your grace, ...

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

The cross, Martin Luther wrote, was the devil’s mousetrap. The devil smelled cheese, and wham, felt steel. Thus, we see a little baby lying defenseless in a crib at Bethlehem, and a tortured man hangi...

The Following is an excerpt by Duke University Professor Kate Bowler, soon after finding out she has stage four cancer as she sits in her hospital bed following surgery: “I’m going to need for you to...

Death is not ok. By avoiding the subject of death, we act like that’s not true. And we shrink down the scale of Jesus’s victory to fit the world we live in now.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, To show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, But not crushed; Perplexed, But not driven to d...

And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders are not going to...

By illustration, I have been told that when a cow is born, she innately senses that her departure from her mother’s warm womb to a cold, scary, unknown world outside is upon her. In response, she will...

My friend Tim is a manager of a small company. Because he often hires people for their first full-time job, he gets to tell new employees about their benefits. One time, Tim was trying to explain to a...

Death is not an eventuality that with luck, waits for another day. It is today’s cup from which God now insists you drink. If you think that somehow you can choose today not to carry the deaths of you...

It seems to me… that if it is possible … for human beings to choose to live more and more out of tune with the divine intention, to reflect the image of God less and less, there is nothing to stop the...

Even as we eagerly await your return, Lord Jesus, we must confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart, with our entire mind, nor with all of our strength. We have loved our rituals and our...

Introduction Our text falls within a larger section (Luke 16) in which Jesus deals head-on with questions of money, specifically the need to choose God over mammon (the worship of money), in other wo...

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last breath. (1897)

Lord God, we know that you are life, the life which is the light of the world But sometimes we allow the darkness to close in We find ourselves driven apart from you We confess that we do not ...

Almighty and loving God, all of us here today are hurting. Some of us are hurting as the result of circumstances beyond our control. Some of us are hurting because of our own choices. Some of us are f...

Almighty God, in raising Jesus from the grave, you shattered the power of sin and death. We confess that we remain captive to doubt and fear, bound by the ways that lead to death. We are slow to perce...

The leading causes of death are self-inflicted — side effects of tobacco, obesity, alcohol, sexually transmitted disease, drugs, and violence. We need a transformation. We need the kind of personal an...

Reflection The television series Alone follows ten individuals who are left to fend for themselves and by themselves in the wilderness. Now, these aren’t everyday individuals plucked from Main St...

Lord and God, you know what we are about to say in prayer, you know what we ought to say, and even what we need to say but cannot. Our sins trouble us, though they don’t trouble us as much as they sho...

When it comes to life and death, there's no third option.