Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Just Some Thoughts on Death

"She came when we were freezing, but she left us burning up!"

Sometimes I think about the songs I want played at my funeral. I know that SOUNDS morbid, but I love thinking about how fleeting this life is and how permanent eternity is; it's like a wake-up call for my soul! Jonathan Edwards said in one of his seventy resolutions, "Resolved: to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death" (Resolution #9). And Jonathan Edwards is certainly someone I want to emulate!

One of the songs that I'd like to have played at my funeral is "Amy's Song" (by Switchfoot, off the New Way to be Human album), with the hopes that at my death my friends and family would think of it as "Amber's Song"… that the way Amy lived would be the way I lived my life too. Here are the lyrics:

Amy's gone

And time rolls on

How far? how fast? how long?


 

The last time we saw Amy

She was headed for the shore

Fighting off the volatile gray skies


 

She said now begins forever

And that no one knows their time

We bid farewell not knowing

That might be our last good-bye


 

Amy was a fighter

She cut like Casius Clay

She burned like a fire

Despite these rains


 

Where time was a question

She only knew one song

She's singing, "how far, how fast, how long?"


 

Salvation is a fire

In the midnight of the soul

It lights up like a can of gasoline


 

Yeah, she's a freedom fighter

She's a stand up kind of girl

She's out to start a fire

In a bar code plastic world


 

Amy was a fighter

She cut like Casius Clay

She burned like a fire

Despite these rains


 

Where time was a question

She only knew one song

She's singing, "how far, how fast, how long?"


 

When everything stops moving

And I stop to catch my breath

And ride my train of thought

All the way around


 

My thoughts return to Amy

And the fire she's begun

She came when we were freezing

And left us burning up


 

Amy was a fighter

She cut like Casius Clay

She burned like a fire

Despite these rains


 

Where time was a question

She only knew one song

She's singing, "how far, how fast, how long?"

How long, how long, how long?


 

The last time we saw Amy

The last time we saw Amy

Yeah, the last time we saw Amy

The last time we saw Amy

Yeah, the last time we saw Amy


 

I want to start that kind of fire! The kind that leaves others burning with passion for Christ long after I'm gone, so that each person God uses me to influence would be used of God to influence myriads more souls. I know I've got a long way to go, but I'm not giving up!

So I guess thinking about death ultimately leads me to think of two things:

  1. How I live my life will determine how I die, and the kind of impact and legacy my life and death will leave.
  2. How GLORIOUS it will be to finally gaze upon the face of my Lord, Savior, and TREASURE, Jesus Christ!!!

1 comment:

zacklacom said...

"Time That is Left" by Mark Schultz is likely one that I'm gonna want at my funeral. I'll never get tired of that song. And "Legacy" by Sanctus Real launches me into those thoughts about my death and eternity and makes me hate to waste time and beg God for real life.