From Pastor Ben Dolby

I welcome you to walk on this journey of Hope with me.  I’d like for us to begin with something I’ve thought about every day since at least kindergarten.  By the grace of God alone, there is not a day I fail to consider (i.e. think long and hard) my mortality.  Every day, the reality that my biological, earth-bound body will cease to function from the tragedy of my Sinfulness combined with a tragedy of living in a fallen, sinful world stops me in my busy ways and ask sobering questions about life goals and life’s ultimate purpose.  A reading of Genesis chapter 3, the Seventh Chapter of Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians and the First Epistle of John Chapter 1, verses 5 through 10 speak God’s Truth about this hard reality of life and sin.

Before my first post becomes too much of a “wall of text” I’ll get right to the point.  The biggest mistake, “The Supreme Folly” is to fail to consider our mortality every day and Why We Hope while staring death in the face every moment of every day.

My parents gave me the greatest gifts parents can give to their child.  They gave me life, they raised me to know God’s great Love for me and all people in His Salvific Plan victoriously accomplished in the Promise, Life, Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ…and they taught me how to read.  Consider these words from a book I am reading.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
– Frodo Baggins

In an earlier version of his song, Bilbo had used the word “eager” rather than “weary,” but age and experience have shown him that life drains even as it fulfills.  Yet Bilbo’s exhaustion in no way diminishes his conviction that everyone has an “errand” – a mission and purpose – and that everyone undertakes a journey every day of one’s life.  We are all bound on the same Road toward death – indeed, beyond death.  We are immersed in the river of time – the “ever rolling stream” which, in Isaac Watt’s splendid rendering of the Ninetieth Psalm, “bears all its sons away.”  To deny the constant nearness of death is, for Tolkien, the supreme folly. 
 
(excerpt from Ralph C. Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle Earth pages 45-46)

It is understandable that we would want to avoid taking time to consider mortality or to talk about death.  Death is awful, death is heart-breaking, death shares a bitterness that will never subside in this life and to be frank, death sucks.  But the greatest mistake, the Supreme Folly is to act as if we know our own mortality will not be realized in the foreseeable future, ignore the sobering questions concerning life and worst of all, despise the One who is our Hope.  When we seek to ignore the hard things in life, we cheapen and despise the euphoric joy given to us freely by our Saving God.
Will you take this first step with me and consider the constant nearness of death to all of us?  When we take this first step together, we will find ourselves on the Road that goes ever on and on…yes, even through death and beyond our mortality to a joy that man’s speech can not hope to describe or accurately capture.

Come along with me and see Why We Hope, living in the Eucatastrophe.