Death

Today a good man died.

He was one of the good ones. He was the one you wanted at your back in the battle.

And he was my friend. He was my friend that would tell it to me like it was.

And he’s not here anymore. He’s gone on ahead. Too far ahead.

He left a beautiful young wife. And a daughter who hasn’t yet seen a birthday cake with a candle on it for her. Now her dady can’t show her how to blow out that candle. And he left this world about 12 hours before he would have welcomed his first son into the world.

A day of joy turned into a day of weeping.

The weather agrees. Cold tears fall from leaden skies. The world weeps.

A good man, cut down in the prime of life. Now I know what that phrase really means.

He was wise. He “got it.” He had integrity. Real integrity. Right priorities that he really lived by. He was the man needed here in Albania. Today. In this situation. He was the kind that would have made a difference with wide ripples.

Instead his firstborn son will celebrate each birthday as a deathday.

What could have been. Potential life. That’s what I mourn. I know he’s better off. I know he’s in a place with no more tears, no more pain, no more stress… But I mourn for a young wife that won’t have her strapping young husband to laugh with at the children’s antics. I mourn the little baby girl who will grow up into a young woman without a daddy to tell her how pretty she is. I mourn the just-born baby who will not have a daddy to show him how to be a man. I mourn the boy who will have to learn to kick a soccerball without his daddy.

I mourn, I weep. Such things should not be. My whole being cries out within me that I wasn’t designed to live in a world like this. NOOOOO!!!! I was created to live in a world without death. I’m not talking figuratively here. God designed me, he designed you, to live in a perfect world. But we don’t. That world was lost to a curse resulting from disobedience 10,000 years ago, in another age and another place. Today we live in a world under a curse, a terrible curse, a curse that allows things like THIS to happen.

I read in the Bible that the whole creation groans awaiting redemption. The Big Redo is coming. A new heaven, a new earth. Today I join with the creation. I groan, I writhe, I struggle, I groan from deep within. THIS ISN’T RIGHT! BRING ON EARTH 2.0!!!

Maranatha! Come quickly, Lord Jesus. I don’t want to wait any longer!

Yesterday Genti & Milena Bekteshi went to the hospital expecting to see the arrival of their second child, Aaron. He was still breach and so the doctors decided to wait until today hoping he would turn. Genti returned home and this morning at 5:55am his mom found him on the floor of his house, having died some hours before. A heart attack? An aneurism? I guess it really doesn't matter. Today is a day of mourning, of mourning and groaning.

Shihemi, Genti...

Those were the last 2 words I said to him yesterday. They're still true - it's just now it'll be a little longer...

(Genti was a valued colleague at the Center for Christian Leadership as well as a co-member of our church, Nxenesit e Jezusit.)