On Dying outside the Promised Land

On Dying outside the Promised Land
Deuteronomy 32: 48- 34: 12

I just read the obituary of a fine trumpet player and singer and even lovelier flugelhorn player, Stacy Rowles, who died after a car accident. My personal memory is of the way she once came to give a CD to my wife, Ann, in her wheelchair, and subsequently would regularly come to hug Ann when we went to hear Stacy play. The obituary described Stacy as “perpetually underdiscovered,” better known in Europe than in the United States and better known on the West Coast than in New York. And now it’s too late for her to be properly discovered. Her early death brings out something you might say is true of many deaths. We die before our work is done, or before we could achieve all we wish we could achieve. It’s sometimes said that actually we die only after our work is done, but I am not clear on what basis we can believe this is so. There is such a thing as early death; and while God knows about it, that does not mean we have done all that God might have wanted us to do...