Sunday morning we awoke to spring-like weather, food to fill our bellies, loved ones under one roof, praising one God, and we sang:
“Blessed be your name,
when the sun’s shining down on my
when the world’s all that it should be.
Blessed be your name.”
After church I saw the pictures, read the words:
ISIS Beheads 21 Coptic Christians
I froze. My eyes needed to focus, I felt I needed a mental ‘restart’ to comprehend the horror I viewing.
My reaction? God help them.
That was it. No tears. No fear. Just words we speak when there are no pat answers, no solutions, no … words.
“On the road marked with suffering,
though there’s pain in the offering”
Twenty-one men, twenty-one people, twenty-one souls …
Sons, fathers, brothers, neighbors.
Men who had names, which meant everything to loved ones.
Killed, brutally, in a foreign land, by foes who hid behind their masks. Killed, wearing the same clothes, as if to hide their identities, their names.
“Ya Rabbi Yasou”
Their final words, the cries of their hearts, the words that they wanted their killers, the world to know as the sweetest words to them:
“My Lord Jesus”
They were telling the world that this bloody end, was just the beginning. They were telling the world that their eternity had been bought, paid for, by the One who they lived for, who they died for.
They were telling the world, in a most tangible way, that “to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Their deaths may just have been their most lasting testimony.
“from the rising of the sun over us,
’til the setting of the same,
though there’s pain in the offering,
blessed by your holy name.”
itsawonderfilledlife 