People died yesterday at Michigan State University.
Today at Henry Ford College, we talked with students about life and death. We listened to students share their thoughts, their fears, their beliefs. We listened to them. Then we listened more and continued listening. Always, we shared with all of them the clear and simple message about life and death.
Yesterday’s campus shooting at MSU attracted national attention as such events always do, and as they should. Even as campus shootings and other public active shooter events have tragically become increasingly so much more commonplace in recent years, these events must never become normal, ordinary, accepted, even expected.
Yesterday’s campus shooting was out of the ordinary.
Today’s conversations about life and death were not unusual or out of the ordinary. While the conversations did touch on the MSU event, this was not actually either the inciting incident for or the primary focus of the life and death conversations at HFC. The conversations at HFC today about life and death were the regularly scheduled, yet never ordinary or common and certainly not mundane or unexceptional conversations.
This is not to say what all people may consider them. The students who voluntarily and enthusiastically come back again every week, even multiple days each week, clearly are drawn to these life and death conversations. These life and death conversations are at once simple and profound, deep and clear, challenging and invigorating. Yet, these conversations are informal, casual, in that sense ordinary and basic, real and common people discussing profound and deep conversations of life and death.
That is why every single one of these encounters, every exchange, every greeting, each short conversation and every deep and profound discussion spanning multiple days and component topics is sobering.
We are not promised tomorrow. None of us is. You are not promised tomorrow, and neither am I.
This is why we engage our atheist friends, our muslim friends, Sunni and Shia, our Hindu and the occasional Buddhist student friends, our catholic and protestant friends, our agnostic friends, students and staff alike.
Every day is a gift, and we share this great gift of life. Yet, we have this message in jars of clay. This message is clear that the One and Only Almighty and Eternal, Almighty Creator of the Universe holds out this free gift of eternal life, every day, every moment, in each new conversation again. As long as we have breath in our lungs, He is calling us, calling me, calling you to Himself.
JESUS said, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
It is the most ordinary thing for people to take this amazing gift of life for granted. Every day. It is even more common for people to take this all surpassing gift of eternal life for granted and in fact to reject this message and this gift. And so, people die each day, going to eternity separated from God.
People died yesterday at MSU.
People are dying today.
And every day we continue to hold out this message of eternal life through JESUS CHRIST.
This is a matter of life and death.
Wisdom in the WORD 