Day 9, Funeral Road Trip

Over the last two weeks I have attended 9 different funerals at our church.  Luckily I only knew one person that had passed away.  You might be asking why I attended so many funerals for people I didn't know, well I was just running our sound and media.  Nothing major but still had to take the time out of my own schedule to do it.  We are in the process of putting together a good sound team, so hopefully this will all be temporary.

So back to the funerals.  A couple weeks ago, our church hosted 6 funerals in 7 days.  This is the most I have seen in my 18 months there.  Up till then, we would only have 1 a month, maybe.  But it seems like we have had a lot of people pass away in the last couple weeks.  Some of the funerals only had a handful of people, to today, where our entire church was full and we probably had almost 500 people there.  During most of the funerals, I would spend my time catching up on my blogs or blogging myself.  I wasn't really into the funerals because I didn't know the people.  Today's funeral was different though.  The funeral was for a man named Sam Cross, a grandfather in our church who was in a horrific tractor accident that put him in the hospital for two weeks before he finally passed away.  Again, I didn't know Sam, but I knew the way people felt about him and it made me sad.

I sat at his funeral and heard his sons talk about him and I kept thinking back to my fathers funeral just two years ago.  Sam's boys told stories of the good times and the great person their father was.  I sat back and thought about my father and how similar the stories where.  I was saddened by it.  I thought back to the one big question unChristians ask Christians, "why do bad things happen to good people?".  Here was a good Christian man who was tragically taken from his family.  A man who treated everyone with great respect.  A man who spent two weeks in the hospital before going to meet his God.

Why do bad things happen to good people?  Why does it seem so hard for us to understand the world we live in and the God who loves us.  We can't change the world we live in or the consequences of living in the world, but we can remember that we have a God who cares and loves us very much.  Sometimes I envy the people at the funerals I attend because they are now singing with the angels in Heaven.  RIP