Written 1 September 2025:
Yesterday was a month to the day that the Lord called my Ambrose to himself, and Ambrose listened because being with Jesus is better than being here. I preached yesterday, and I was going to include the following but decided to cut it from the sermon lest I steal the attention from the text. Plus, I’m certain I wouldn’t be able to get the words out if I did include it. Maybe here isn’t even a good place for it, but I figured I might as well share, maybe it will help someone at some point…
July 31, 2025, was, without question, the worst day of my life. The last month has been the worst month of my life. There surely is nothing as sorrowful as holding the lifeless body of your child, then filling out a death certificate, and ordering an urn, then going to pick it up. Every day I think about Ambrose and it’s impossible to articulate the sorrow. Everyone’s grief is different, right? But I’ll tell you this: without the resurrection, I’d be sunk. In the past month, the only hope that has enabled me to wake up and even go through the motions of the mundane is the resurrection past and future.
When I drove home to collect an overnight bag to sleep in a hospital room on July 31, I didn’t wish I had a bigger or nicer house, a nicer car, a larger bank account. I didn’t put hope in being able to buy myself ‘treats’ to make myself feel better or vacations and trips to take. None of those things would have helped in the slightest. Nothing this side of the sun, would give me any hope at all. All I had to rest upon, to find comfort in, was the resurrection at the end of the age. To enjoy Christ the way Ambrose has enjoyed Him. When Ambrose will be made whole and I will be with him.
When I said yesterday that there is no better hope than this, and I added “trust me,” that’s what I meant. When ‘darkness seems to hide His face,’ the only ‘anchor that holds within the veil’ is the resurrection of Christ which promises a resurrection of the just at the end of the age. I have nothing else to grasp in the sorrow.
I will never be the same. I don’t want to be the same. Everything else fades into a formless gray. Only Christ has color. Without Him and His resurrection, I’d be sunk.
Maranatha.
The Bearded Ecclesiologian 