Oh Wow!

My wife is a chaplain/spiritual counselor for Visiting Nurse and Hospice Care of Santa Barbara in the hospice division.   VNHCSBdoes amazing work and has scores of wonderful people on staff who support and care during one of the most intimate and difficult times of their lives.  This past Sunday was the annual service of remembrance when family members and some of the staff gather to remember those who have passed in the previous year.  Each year it is a moving time as photos are projected and names read...

The speaker this year got me thinking.  He shared a quote which he attributed to Rumi.  Since then, I've googled it and found it also referenced as a Tibetan Buddhist saying.  It could be either or neither, but it still inspired this blog post.  "When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. When you die, you rejoice, and the world cries."  It made me think of what are reported as the final words of Steve Jobs, "Oh wow!  Oh wow!  Oh wow!"

Frankly, I don't think about an afterlife very often.  I don't think the issue is all that important.  I'm not entirely sure what I even believe about one (although I am pretty sure what I don't believe.).  What I do believe is that the grace and love of God is all powerful and undeniable.  Whatever it looks like after we die, it is shaped by the grace and love of God... a grace,  a love so far beyond our understanding that all one could possibly do when confronting it without a veil between us and it is rejoice and exclaim, "oh wow!"