I said goodbye to a friend today. My buddy Orlando is moving back to the east coast after a year out here in Oregon. I am going to miss him. We had a lot of laughter over the last year that is going to be missing from my life now. As we ate lunch today and talked about his plans for going back and the trip I was excited for what the future holds for him. I don’t mind leave takings like this one, where a person is heading off to do life somewhere else and is excited about it.

Tomorrow I am doing a memorial service for a family. Talking with families about their loved ones who have just passed away is a hard thing. You see the sorrow in their eyes as they recall stories of the good times and the laughter they shared. You are a part of their grief and mourning. You offer hope and prayer for comfort to them. You try to honor the individual and the family in the best way possible, by pointing to Jesus’ goodness.

As I sit in my office and think about saying goodbye to Orlando and prep for helping this family mourn I can’t help but compare the experiences. In one case it is leaving by choice, in another it is the inevitable leave taking we all face as fragile human beings. Both have elements of sorrow and joy, personal and communal. We celebrate and send off. We mourn and let go.  For my part, it helps to remember that goodbye is really “see you later.” As Christians our hope in in Christ that we will partake of the resurrection. When we say goodbye to those we love it isn’t final. We could honestly say, “see you later.” Even to those we have lost to the grave. I, for one, am grateful for that hope today. 

As many of you know, I love video games. I spend a lot of my down time playing them, they help me clear my head and think about something else for a little while. Their stories take me to another world (or several, for sci-fi games) and give me an experience I never could have here in the real world. I love the escapism of video games, but sometimes they give me very real frustration. I find “bugs” that make the game not work or end up being something that costs me time because I have to redo things in the game and while you would think that this would just be an excuse to play more it is really frustrating to progress and end up having to start something over which you had accomplished already! These “bugs” are often fixed through a process called patching, someone who made the game continues to support it by adding the fixes that the various users bring to their attention. Some of these fixes are pretty major while others are just making sure a particular door is sitting right on its hinges. All of them are necessary for the game to be its best version.

I think that the Christian life is a little like those video games sometimes. I have a version of life that seems to be working well, when all of a sudden, I find a “bug” or glitch in the life I am living. I then need to assess the problem and see if it was user error (maybe I was just trying to use it in the wrong way!) or if the issue lies deeper in my code. If the issue is something wrong with my “code” (my heart is misaligned, or I haven’t slept enough, or I am not spending the time I need to with Jesus for our relationship to grow) I have to report this error to the developer of my life so He can fix it. Christ designed us to live a certain way, because of some bad code that got added by an early user (see Genesis chapter 3 for more details) we have to deal with some “bugs” that happen now and then. Christ is so gracious as the developer of our lives that He has continued to support this broken version even though it wasn’t His actions that caused the issues! He desires for us to have the best version of our lives and is willing to sit down with us and help us find the fixes for the “bugs” that pop up in life. He has offered us a way to restore what has been broken through His sacrifice and wants us to accept His offer for ongoing support and care as we figure out what living without the “bug” of sin in our lives can be like. Will you accept that help? Or do you want to continue to live with the “bugs”?