Fresh out of seminary, I became good friends with a guy who owned a funeral home. I remember asking him what was the most significant thing he had learned over the years in that job. He was a godly man, a member of my church, so I thought he’d offer me some deep theological insight. Instead, he simply said, “The sap rises, and the sap falls.”<\/p>\n
I appreciated his eccentric brevity. I also expected a little more. So I stared at him, waiting. But nothing followed. <\/p>\n
Nearly 10 years later, his statement has haunted me—its bluntness and brevity. I hear his words in the back of my mind almost 10 years later. A day is coming for us all—the sap rises, and the sap falls.<\/p>\n
FUNERALS—OR “CELEBRATIONS OF LIFE”?<\/strong><\/p>\n Over the last decade of serving the local church, I’ve noticed a trend: people don’t like thinking about death. In every conceivable way, we dismiss, ignore, and refuse to acknowledge our mortality. In the words of the blues artist, Albert King, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” Nobody wants to die and nobody wants to think about death. We can usually stay busy enough and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As strange as it sounds, we can\u2019t afford to waste the opportunities a funeral provides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[312],"class_list":["post-10589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-leadership","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10589"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10591,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10589\/revisions\/10591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}