“Jesus replied, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’” John 12:23-25

This world has so many griefs, and the older you get, the more the griefs pile on. A dear man, a father of ten, who I respected as a father as much as any father I have known, recently died in his sixties, a victim of brain cancer. He faced his death with such courage, faith and grace, but he left behind so many grieving family members and friends who would have loved more time with him.

The best man at my wedding survived his first two treatments for cancer, but now lives with the uncertainty of knowing this kind of cancer is never fully gone, it is just latent, ready to spring forth again.

A college friend of mine just lost his thirty-something son in an industrial accident. A fellow pastor lost his daughter to what was likely a drug overdose in the same week. Another pastor friend has an estranged child. A beloved relative of ours has gone through a brutal stretch trying to conceive, and stop losing, young life in her womb.

When will it all end? The sobering truth is not on this planet.

Ambrose (340-397), Bishop of Milan, faced a grave loss when his brother Satyrus—Ambrose’s right-hand man and most trusted assistant—suddenly died. Speaking in the aftermath of his very palpable grief, Ambrose accepts how death is the way of the world, calling for our surrender rather than our indictment:

“The earth groans under the plough, is lashed by rains, struck by tempests, bound by cold, burnt by the sun, that it may bring forth its yearly fruits; and when it has clothed itself with a variety of flowers, it is stripped and spoiled of its own adornment. How many plunderers it has! And it does not complain of the loss of its fruits to which it gave birth that it might lose them, nor thereafter does it refuse to produce what it remembers will be taken from it.”[i]