6 Months to Eternity

Life has been so fast, I didn't even realize. Shame on me.

It has been six months since a good and dear friend of mine died. It was so sudden... no one expected it. There was no reason he should have died.

But he did.

He was a wonderful young man. So vibrant and passionate. He loved the Lord, loved others, and had a obsession.... er, passion for saving the planet. An environmentalist I could respect.

Of course, when he graduated high school, everybody asked, "Where you off to college to?"
His reply was that he wasn't going immediately. He was going to take a year off and enter into missions.

To make sure his faith was strong enough to face the world. I weep when I remember that fact- if only I could have such humility.

He never got to. Two days after his graduation, he drowned. It was an event that changed our lives.

I managed to get to his visitation, but I couldn't attend his funeral, as I had to fly home. Pardon my french, but I still feel like an asshole for that one.

He was a pure soul. We tried for a while to rationalize and understand. We never did. We simply accepted that he was too pure for this world, and that God wanted him in Heaven.

You know that saying? That "you never realize what you have until you've lost it"?
This applies here. It wasn't until after his death that I came to the conclusion that this man was a saint. He had a holiness, a purity about him. When we held a memorial service at my high school, several of the students said they saw him; that he comforted them and said it was alright. I'm convinced that it was real. There is something about the Communion of Saints that works like that.

He was a simple fellow- he loved his God, he loved all people, and he really hated cars that were powered by fossil fuels.

Memory eternal, my friend. I love you.

He started a blog. He only had one post. I shall share it with you:

"For the past couple of weeks now, my mind has been in space, a sort of mental meteoroid if you will. It feels like it is floating, far out in space, barely close enough to Earth to be affected by Earth’s gravity at all. There’s nothing to support it, and it is extremely difficult for it to manipulate anything, since without gravity, nothing has weight, nothing carries meaning. It is not affected by reality; reality carries no weight. Even if reality did affect it, it would not know what reality felt like, having never experienced it before. My mind is simply floating, only identified by its state of perpetual change. It sits in a fog of verisimilitude, but cannot determine what is actually true. It feels things, but the emotions are indistinguishable and blurry. It’s like when your eyes get all watery because the sun is too bright, and you can only look at the ground. It seems like the only things it can feel strongly are things like fear, apprehension, shame, and inadequacy, though these emotions do not always originate at a specific source. It can also feel apathy, if that is an emotion, but it cannot force itself to feel apathy toward the raw and real feelings that bind it.

The Son is shining in my eyes, so brightly that I can barely see Him. I don’t know how He can be so dazzling and still feel like He’s 93 million miles away. Just as Earth itself must yield to the sun’s gravity, so must I yield to the gravity of the Son. The Son’s gravity is powerful and strong, always reining me in when my orbit speeds out of control, reigning over me. The forces of Earth cannot overpower it. Despite the fog, strong beams of radiant truth still brightly shine, and do not change like shifting shadows. No celestial eclipse can block this ethereal light.

And then there is the heat. In the farthest reaches of my orbit, icy particles of shame, doubt and fear quickly attach and weigh me down, until I can barely move. But even here, the Son’s heat blasts from out across the solar system, in rhythmic, pulsating waves, the very heartbeat of God. The ice of apathy and inadequacy melt quickly away and are replaced by glowing warmth. Though I am still bombarded by an endless storm of ice, it cannot overpower the warmth of God’s love that has penetrated to my core and now radiates from me as well."