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BROTHERS
10 The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away. ESV
Psalm 90:10
Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” ESV
John 11:23
The scripture (Psalm 90) tells me what my life experience confirms: We are, as a generality, allotted seventy years of life. Some of us will live beyond that. If we do, the added years may come at a dear price – a levy that may be extracted in a variety of painful ways.
I am the youngest and least in every way of three brothers. John, my oldest sibling, lived to be eighty-seven. He was gifted with a concert-quality singing voice, keen interpersonal skills, and excellent business sense. After college, he became the Minister of Music for the old Temple Baptist Church caring for all of their music needs and programs including radio and television. Later he was an executive for RCA and managed sales for their Christian music labels on the West Coast. Immediately upon retirement, he founded his own music business and later moved to the Nashville area where he established his own record company. A year before his death, he sold his twenty-acre estate to the Marriott Hotel family. John is dead now. Part of the harvest of my own long life has been that I lived to attend his burial. My brother will rise again!
Closest to me in age, my brother Holmes is the brightest person that I have ever personally known. Upon his graduation from high school, I remember that several first-tier American colleges offered him full scholarships. He chose instead to attend a small bible school in Springfield, Missouri. He graduated as President of his class (Jerry Falwell had been given this honor two years before). In the entirety of his education which included both Baptist and Presbyterian seminaries he never earned less than an “A”. A scholar in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Sanskrit, Holmes went on to pastor two churches retiring from the ministry at age eighty. His life has been one of faithful service, crushingly bad health, and the experience of burying four of his five children. Now he has blood cancer from which we are told he will not recover.
I have lived to witness these things. They are part of the wages due my eighty-three years.
My experience with life thus far informs me that such negotiation as there is around its cessation is never related to “if” but rather has everything to do with “when”. There is also a sense in which every life, no matter that every hour of it may have been rich with love and every moment adorned with some joy, will in a purely human sense ultimately become a tragedy. How much then should we love and value our Redeemer who will, from the ashes of our efforts and desserts, raise us to an eternity of perfection and bliss!
The specter of death has been the catalyst for long and blessed talks between my brothers and me. As we discussed the approach of the end, I sensed in them a quickening, an acceptance, an anticipation, and an overall willingness – even eagerness – to fly away. Parting is a requirement for reunions. Darkness precedes dawn.
Christ will be faithful to honor the precious promises that he has made to His redeemed. He will keep that which we have committed to Him against that day – a day in which the dead in Christ shall rise again.
George Moore
Elder Emeritus
