B E D S I D E S

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So much of my life leads me to bedsides.

It's a funny thing these places.  Sobering and joyful...full of life and full of life's final rest.

At the bedside there's rejoicing as a new bundle of joy enters life with tears and hope that tomorrow will be brighter.  At bedsides there's the beauty
created when two people fall in love and join their lives together in marriage because two is always better than one.

Conversely, bedsides are a place that some find illness and healing again to rejoin life and live another day.  At bedsides there's hurting and pain and loss.  These bedsides hold the end of life's journey as a soul is reconnected to our Maker.

Christ is found at a bedside as a child prays a prayer acknowledging their sin nature.  Comfort is found as tears stream down a once helpless face all at a bedside.

Life begins here.

Life ends here.

Life happens here.

At a bedside.

So much of my life leads me to bedsides...to places of joy and sorrow.  But at these bedsides there's always one thing that I've found.  No one wants to be alone there whether in pain or happiness.  We long to share the bedside with humanity knotting our lives together.

A truth often overlooked in business of life is this: We all need each other.  We all have a drive to connect with each other and the world around us.  Engrained in our DNA from birth, this drive for human connection will cause us to do strange things.  Anything to join our life with another's.

Tonight my heart is breaking in remembrance of the bedsides that I've stood beside watching painful life pass to the next.  Singing them to heaven, surrounded by friends--by family--I have an assurance.  Many of these lives passed I will see again.

But until I do, I'll continue to stand at the bedsides of life and to live with the living.

A choice I ask you to make today...a hard one, to be sure, but one that must be made...a commitment that must be engaged.  It will cost you the world, but you will gain everything.

Life is short.  We will all one day be baptized in the sheets and pillows as we pass from one side of the bed to the other.  We just will.  So I ask you--so I beg you--live now as if that final rest were today because in actuality it might very well be.

As in the bedside of childhood, find solace and peaceful rest in His presence wrapped forever in His loving arms.  

So much of my life leads me back bedsides.


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