If there is one thing that makes 90% of everyday concerns moot, it's a funeral. There was one two years past that expressed both the pain and the hope wrapped up in a shared life, yanked by the end of that earthly connection. A husband left behind a family with precious children, sisters, parents, cousins, friends for whom goodbye felt too sudden, too definitive. I did not know him well, but that did not hamper my tears, or the ache of seeing a cathedral full of people who loved him. 

 

The message that the minister offered us was the word always. 

 

"And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Matthew 28

 

In a world where maybe and sometimes and when it's convenient dilute the intentions of many of us to follow through on a job or a relationship, always fills my lungs like a Chinook. 

 

God will always be with us, always protect us, always love us. That is a groundbreaking promise. Hearing that word, and saying it with three hundred other people whose track records for constancy are spotty felt as if I could ride on the invisible wind of that Chinook like a bird. 

 

I suppose none of us have any business claiming to be faithful. We meant it when we proclaimed our loyalty, but then life gets complicated and commitment loses traction. 

 

Without God, none of us would be able to act on the words of the postlude in that funeral.  

 

"I can go the distance."