Nov 23-24 - Colossians 3:15-17

 

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. - Colossians 3:15-17

 

In three verses in Colossians 3, the Apostle Paul says "give thanks" three times. I think it must be important! I believe, indeed, that thanksgiving is a profoundly untapped resource in too many people's lives.

 

1

 

The first time that Paul says some version of "give thanks," he says, "let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts ... and be thankful."

 

From my experiencing -- and from helping shepherd hundreds of lives -- the best way to find peace is to be thankful. It's almost like a prescription! There are two ways to view the world. One is from a myth of scarcity. We worry about what we don't have. Thankfulness transforms hearts by focusing on what we do have ... which is generally so much.

 

Think about it ... Worry focuses on what? Emptiness. But thanksgiving focuses on blessing ... and on the one who blesses! And when we're looking up to Jehovah-Jireh -- our provider -- we are continually reassured that all that we really need is eternally in his hands.

 

2

 

The second time that Paul talks about thankfulness, he says, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God."

 

This verse could be a chicken and an egg scenario: Which comes first? Is it the singing of spiritual songs that brings "thankfulness [to] your hearts"? Or is it a thankful heart that helps you sing so joyfully? (I advise singing praise -- even from the valleys -- until we feel thankful. And then out of our thankfulness, to sing praise even more. It's like a joyful upward spiral. Song begets thankfulness ... which begets more song ... which begets more thanksgiving.

 

And, you know, there's one more piece to this phrase -- it's about teaching, admonishing, and God's word dwelling richly. God's Word is Truth. Truth proclaims light in the midst of darkness, hope in the midst of despair, and joy even in the face of sorrow. Is it the Truth of God's mercy and grace that brings "thankfulness [to] your hearts" even in the face of life's trials? Or is it a life of thankfulness that drives you again and again to God's Word -- hungrily -- so that your soul is equipped for those times of trial.

 

3

 

For the third time in three verse Paul encourages us to give thanks. This time he says, "And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." When we live with thanksgiving in our hearts, we tend to see God more and more -- and more gloriously -- it this heart of Thanksgiving empowers us to serve more joyfully, more generously, more trustingly.

 

Fini

 

Did you know thanksgiving did all that?

 

May prayer is that this weekend you enjoy good food and blessed fellowship around well-set table. But most of all, I pray that it's really about thanksgiving. God is the generous provider, the true author of all true blessings.

 

In Christ's Love,

a guy who prays that

this weekend inspires

more peace, more song

and a greater hunger

(for more than just turkey)

 

Nov 21 - Romans 12:2

 

Do not be

conformed to this world,

but be transformed by

the renewing of your minds,

so that you may discern

what is the will of God—

what is good and

acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:2

 

"This world is a mess." Have you ever said that?

 

Well, how did we get here?

 

In his book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher condenses seven hundred years of philosophical history in the West into one quick chapter. Today, I'm going to do it in one quick devotion. And I want to start with the Reformation ... for an important reason.

As a good Lutheran, I'm good at celebrating all of the positive, transformational blessings of the Reformation. Martin Luther helped restore the authority of Scripture, reclaim a Gospel of Grace, and place the Word of God in the average person's hands. 

 

But ... have you ever heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences. What was the curse of the Reformation? It fractured the Authority of the Church, and though it was awesome to finally have Scripture in individual hands, what happened? If individuals didn't agree with a teaching, they'd break away to start their own congregations or denominations. Certainly, the sixteenth century church needed reform, but the unintended consequence has been five centuries of church fractures and divisions.

I'm about to unfold seven hundred years of philosophical trends that have changed the West. And I'm going to admit, up front, most of these trends -- like the Reformation itself -- produced both positives and negatives. I'm also going to admit to quite a bit of over-simplification ... but it's all to make an important point ...

 

 

Seven hundred years ago, everything in the West -- including meaning, purpose, life, philosophy, etc. -- centered around God. What's happened over the last seven hundred years has been a steady, incremental, and now total switch. Self is viewed as the highest good, and God (if He exists at all) is peripheral. Furthermore, Truth is increasingly a bad word; nowadays, feelings tend to trump ideas.

In quick bullet-point fashion, watch how this happened (starting with nominalism in the 14th century) ...

 

• Nominalism invited humanity to question the absolutes -- the timeless universals upon which all thought was based.
• The Renaissance celebrated human potential. (Do you see the beginning of the rise of the self?)
• The Reformation fractured church authority.
• Which meant in the next generation, the likes of Descartes were encouraging people to question all previous forms of thought and authority.
• I'm so glad for millions of scientific advancements. But new ears of Scientific Exploration produced in humanity the pride of Babel -- "Look what we can do."
• The Industrial Revolution had at least three negative effects. It uprooted and splintered families as people moved to the cities to seek work. Culture was suddenly less agrarian, separating most individuals from the intimate connection to the rhythms of Creation (and to the Creator, in whom "we live and move and have our being" -- see Acts 17:28). Furthermore, with individuals producing less and less of their own food and sustenance, money became a more and more central part of human life.
• Deism – was the belief that God is essentially a blind watchmaker. He created the watch/the world, wound it up, and now lets it run without much (if any) interference. The deistic God is, thus, an inactive God.
• Romanticism trumpeted emotion and personal freedom. (Self.)
• Darwinism provided the first real way to explain creation without God.
• And within a generation or two after Darwin, what was rising? Atheism. Communism. Fascism. Eugenics.
• The was also the rise of the Sigmund Freud and Therapeutic. It was the call to self-fulfillment and self-actualization.
• Modernism believed that not only were species supposedly evolving, but human nature and potential were evolving too. But Modernism came crashing down after two World Wars, the Holocaust, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on civilians, and a hundred million executed by Stalin and Mao.
• This led to the rise of Post-Modernism and its cynicism. If humanity isn't producing answers, then the individual must be the ultimate source of truth (at least for that individual).
• Thus, Relativism rose, proclaiming, "What's true for you is true for you and what's true for me is true for me."
• Materialism – also rose. We're encouraged to purchase our happiness and shop for our meaning.
• The Sexual Revolution is totally self-in-center.
• And I don't even know if there's a name for our current philosophy. It used to be that Ideas shaped Feelings and Actions. Now Feelings shape Ideas and Actions. Which is why we can't have any civil discourse anymore. To discuss Ideas is viewed as offensive, because you're not debating an Idea at the level of Ideas, you're discussing at the level of Feeling and thus perceived as attacking the person.

 

Do you see it? Seven centuries and God has moved out of the center of our modern, Western, philosophical imagination and Self and Feeling are now the highest ideals.

 

Oops!

 

And a bigger oops? It's that you and I are products of this Western culture. It's the water we swim in. We're so accustomed to it that we don't even recognize that we're drowning.

 

Escape takes intentionality. Reclaiming faith takes being deep. Bringing true hope -- rather than temporary satisfaction -- requires caring about ideas. We need Truth. We need God to be in the center -- in our center. And it starts with personal confession. Change must start with us.

 

Do you want change? Well, I don't know about you, but I want God in the center -- for myself and my family -- because I'm increasingly dissatisfied with our messy, modern trends.

 

In Christ's Love,

a guy who wants to be like

the famous sculpture

in today's header.

I want to be transformed ...

and it start by thinking,

by the renewing of my mind.

 

Nov 20 - Revelation 4:11

 

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things, and

by your will they existed

and were created.”

Revelation 4:11

 

Have you been worried about our modern American culture in recent years?

 

So have I.

 

See if any of these sound familiar …

 

·         Increasing pace and increasing debt.

·         Growing stress and accelerating busyness.

·         Anxiety. Fear. Depression. And way too much self-medication.

·         Rampant secularism, individualism, materialism, and cynicism.

·         Greater divides, shrillness, and intolerance.

 

Is there hope? Well … if there’s a God, then there’s always hope!!!

 

To reorient our actions and our hope, I’ve spent the last week or two introducing you to the book, The Benedict Option. It offers, as its subtitle proclaims, A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

 

Now, I know that we all want to jump immediately to answers and quick-fix-techniques, but before we know where to go from here, it’s important to know how we got here. Thus, author Rod Dreher starts his book with a review of the last seventeen hundred years of philosophical history. (Wait! Don’t let the word philosophy scare you! This is just a summary of how and why people think the way they do.)

 

In picture form, here’s the quick summary of the last seventeen hundreds of thought in the West.

 

 

The picture on the left represents the first thousand years of Christendom. I’ll give you a quote to describe what this looked like in just a minute, but in general, God was viewed as so present and alive that the Lord was clearly understood as the center of all things. And man, on the other hand, was on the periphery. In fact, if humans were to find purpose and meaning (ultimately and exclusively), it was understood that it came only from whatever God-the-Creator ordained. That was the first thousand years.

 

Over the next seven hundred years – step-by-step – God has been philosophically pushed out of the center of the dominant worldviews in the West. The result? We now are dominated by a modern secular worldview. (It’s something like the picture on the right. Trumpeted by the likes of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, this modern way of thinking tells us that the highest priority – the center of the circle – ought to be the self. It’s all about self-fulfillment and self-actualization. The individual is preeminent. It’s viewed as oppressive to say that there is an objective Truth. Thus, God – especially, the traditional view of God – is increasingly at the periphery.  

 

If that sounds familiar, I want to paint for you a picture of a more vibrant past. To do that, let me close today with an extended quote from Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option …

 

[For the first thousand years of Christendom, people] lived in what philosopher Charles Taylor calls an “enchanted world”—one so unlike ours that we struggle to imagine it. … Medievals experienced the divine as far more present in their daily lives. … In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other … Medievals experienced everything in the world sacramentally … effecting a real transformation… [T]hey believed that God was present everywhere and revealed Himself to us through people, places, and things…

 

The only reason the material world had any meaning at all was because of its relationship to God. … Truth was guaranteed by the existence of God … [Thus,] medieval man did not see himself as fundamentally separate from the natural order; rather, the alienation he felt was an effect of the Fall, a catastrophe … His task was to join himself to the love of God and harmonize his own steps with the great cosmic dance.

 

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who’s tired of

dancing the world’s dance

(disco was king

when I was young,

now it’s the Shmoney,

the NaeNae and the Twerk).

No, I’m a guy who’s tired

of doing the world’s dance,

and I’m ready to dance

God’s cosmic dance

Nov 18-19 - Psalm 23:6

Surely your goodness and

mercy will follow me

all the days of my life, and

I will dwell in the house

of the Lord forever.

Psalm 23:6

 

One of Mary Louise's favorite sayings is that each of us should look like a sheep from the front and shepherds from behind.

 

You know what that means, right? From the front, we should look like sheep ... because we're eager to follow after pastors, spiritual mentors, and Jesus himself, right? Meanwhile, from the back, we should look like shepherds, investing our lives in others, mentoring them in wisdom and Word.

 

On another day, I'll ask you who you are mentoring! It's important. We learn five times more as a teacher than a student. And Jesus' preeminent call is for each of us to "make disciples" of others (see Matthew 28). Yes, on another day, I'll ask who is following after you as a sheep follows a shepherd. But today I have another question ...

 

In today's passage, if the Lord is my/our Shepherd, and you are a faithful, following sheep in his pasture, what is following you?!

 

Read the verse.

 

Do you see it?

 

So many go chasing after happiness. If so, we're pointed in the wrong direction. We need to keep Jesus in front of us - not some temporary, illusive, fickle, goal of some transient human emotion. Rather, if we want to find blessing, we simply need to follow the Lord ... and then "goodness and mercy (and every other human blessing) will follow (after us) all the days of (our) lives."

 

In other words, if you want blessing, chase God ... don't chase the things of the world.

 

In Christ's Love,

a guy who thinks

life would be easier

if I were a dog --

I'd be fed, well-rested,

and busy chasing

after good things, like

play-balls and squirrels

(Wait, that's what God

wants to give us.

Follow the good master

and life is a blessing.)

 

Nov 16 - Joshua 24:15

 

Some of Joshua’s

final words to God’s People:

“Choose this day whom

you will serve, whether the gods

your ancestors served

in the region beyond the River

or the gods of the Amorites

in whose land you are living;

but as for me and my house,

we will serve the Lord.”

Joshua 24:15

 

Yesterday – as a summary of last Sunday’s sermon (per your request) – I listed a handful of things that define our modern American culture. Self-diagnose yourself. As a quick review, how many of these apply to you and your family …

 

·         Increasing Pace and Constant Change

·         Carpool Lines, Unending Busyness, and Growing Exhaustion

·         Self-Medication: with mindless, mind-numbing activities like too much TV, Social Media, Computer Games, etc.

·         Self-Medication: with an increasing middle-class, middle age epidemic of Drugs, Alcohol, Pornography, Promiscuity

·         Self-Medication: with Materialism, Shopping Therapy, and Drowning Debt

·         Too many Weekend Chores and Sunday Activities – which increasingly preclude physical rest and spiritual refreshment

·         Anxiety and Fear – as a result of inflationary costs and deflating salaries.

·         And the final word … Whirlwind

 

How many of us feel like we’re trapped in a whirlwind?

 

And what seems to go first? Our ability to slow down enough to listen for and hear God.

 

Relax. We’ve been here before. For example, the prophet Elijah – at his very lowest point in life – heard these words from God. “‘[Elijah,] go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks into pieces … but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice” – 1 Kings 19:11-13.

 

Where do we find God? Where do we find hope?

 

Here’s a more recent illustration … Commentator Rod Dreher started his book, The Benedict Option, with a story that went something like this: The weatherman said it was going to be a wet weekend – maybe four inches or rain over the next four days. Nothing that uncommon for southern Louisiana. But when the rain stopped a few days later, thirty inches of rain had fallen. Places that hadn’t seen water on their lawns in a hundred years were now drowning under twenty feet of water. Thousands and thousands of people hadn’t thought to buy flood insurance, because since the West “discovered” this continent, no one had ever seen this much water.

 

This was the literal Thousand-Year-Flood, said Dreher. But don’t you know that spiritually the Church in the West in undergoing a fifteen-hundred-year flood. As the pope-before-last (Pope Benedict) said in 2012, “The spiritual crisis overtaking the West is the most serious since the fall of the Roman Empire.”

 

Or as Rod Dreher says, “American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears. [So] could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark.”

 

What does that mean?

 

Well, I will talk about practical ark-building details more in next week’s sermon, but here’s a hint of a hint of a solution … To stop fighting the flood of culture, to stop doing a split (the last two days’ image), we need to quit putting one foot in the world and one in the church. We need to “Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served [in past days] or the gods [and priorities] of [the] land [in which] you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

 

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who is praying …

God,

I don’t want to live a divided life,

with one foot in the church and

one foot in a broken culture.

Help me take the hard

but life-giving step of

coming home fully to you.

 

 

Nov 15 - Deuteronomy 30:19

 

“See, I have set before you life

and death, blessings and curses.

Choose life so that you

and your descendants may live”

Deuteronomy 30:19

 

Yesterday, I showed a picture of a man with one leg going one direction and the other leg going the other.

 

Essentially, he’s doing a split.

 

Well, let me tell you in no uncertain terms that men shouldn’t do splits! Our bodies just aren’t built for this!

 

And neither are our souls!

 

To this end – and per your request, a summary of last Sunday’s sermon – I invited us to consider the state of the world that many of us are so desperately clinging to, so desperately trying to keep a foot in. And I asked: Why? Why would we want to keep a foot in an increasingly broken world?

 

To that end – and to get a simple diagnosis of our current culture – I started googling things like The State of The Good Old, Middle-Class, American Dream. Here’s a quick analysis of our modern American culture …

 

·         Increasing Pace

·         Constant Change

 

How many of you feel like the pace of life is continually accelerating? It is! Indeed, we’re living in a period that social scientists are calling “Liquid Modernity.” This modern world is changing so fast that before a new normal solidifies under our feet, it’s changing again. Thus, our cultures foundations are increasingly liquid.

 

·         Carpool Lines

·         Unending Busyness

·         Growing Exhaustion

 

When I laid out this next set of words, tired heads across the congregation were nodding. And I pointed the congregation to two resources. The classic Christian book on finding peace and margin in a busy world is Dr. Richard Swenson’s book, Margin. (One of our small groups read this about ten years ago … and keeps referencing it.) Next, I pointed to a more recent book that one of my sons just pointed me too. Kevin DeYoung (an author for The Gospel Coalition) has a book out entitled, Crazy Busy. I love the illustration on the cover. I love the subtitle more: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem.

 

·         Self-Medication

·         TV, Social Media, Computer Games

·         Drugs, Alcohol, Pornography, Promiscuity

 

As a pastor, my heart breaks as I watch too many friends battling this modern epidemic of busyness and exhaustion. What the modern solution? Self-medication. Some of things we self-medicate with are mindless, brainless. Exhausted, we fall on the couch and numbly watch TV (or scroll through social media or peck away at computer games), only to get up three hours later (more tired than when we started) to go to bed and start the process all over again.

 

But there’s a second, darker form of self-medication that is swallowing increasing numbers of lives. We increasingly numb ourselves with drugs and alcohol. And even more insidiously, too many are increasingly compromising with pornography and promiscuity … (just so they can “feel something”).

 

Need I say that marriages are increasingly disintegrating as we become less and less of who God has created us to be?

 

·         Materialism

·         Debt

 

This is another way we modern Americans self-medicate. We call it shopping therapy. After all, isn’t The Pursuit of Happiness, our highest goal? It was codified as our manifest destiny in the Declaration of Independence, right? But while I was researching this, I found a research paper’s title that haunted me: Johnna Montgomery talks about The Pursuit of (Past) Happiness. That’s the insidiousness of debt. How many of us are still paying for what we thought would make us happy five years ago?

 

·         Weekend Chores

·         Sunday Activities

 

How many of us are so busy during the week that weekends aren’t for relaxation and refreshment anymore. Rather, we have to cram a week’s worth of shopping and chores into two, too-short days.

 

And how many of you remember when Sundays were exclusively for God, church, family, and church family? Now, and with the best of intentions, parents are saying, “I want my child to have the opportunity to be in the same things that I was in when I was a kid.” But now, those activities are increasingly on weekends. And we’re forced to choose between church and world. And church is increasingly losing out. (Now that may not effect a parent’s faith and salvation which is probably shaped and formed and secure, but what are these compromises teaching our children? That church is optional … if something better comes along? Jesus said, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” – Mark 8:36. Or “For what does it profit our children to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”)

 

·         Anxiety

·         Fear

 

In my searching things like “The Good Old, Middle Class American Dream” I found that in the last eight or ten years in America health care costs have skyrocketed. (Up about 40%.) So have college costs. (Again about 40%.) Meanwhile the average household income has gone down about 1%. And we’re increasingly trying to do more and more with less and less. And what’s creeping into the system is more and more fear.

 

·         Whirlwind

 

And I called this toxic brew a “whirlwind.” (More on that tomorrow.)

 

Now, this is a depressing place to end a devotion. Diagnosis is never fun. Tomorrow – and in next Sunday’s sermon – I’ll begin pointing to a godly cure. In the meantime, if you’re too many of those are hitting too close to home, maybe it’s time to start praying: God, I don’t want to live a divided life, with one foot in the church and one foot in a broken culture. Help me take the hard but life-giving step of coming home fully to you.

 

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who is praying …

God,

I don’t want to live a divided life,

with one foot in the church and

one foot in a broken culture.

Help me take the hard

but life-giving step of

coming home fully to you.

 

 

Nov 14 - 1 Kings 18:21

 

How long will you go limping

with two different opinions?

If the Lord is God, follow him!

1 Kings 18:21

 

Several people have asked me to publish some of the things that I talked about in my sermon last Sunday. Over the course of the next few days, here it is …

 

To briefly summarize, I said that the church in American used to look like the picture on the left (see below). Most American Christians had a foot in church and a foot in the world. And in a nation still dominated by (nominally) Judeo-Christian values, most assumed that to-be-a-good-Christian-was-to-be-a-good-American and to-be-a-good-citizen-was-to-be-a-“good”-Christian.

 

 

Things have changed in recent decades (see the picture above on the right). This is a picture of church and culture today. Our American culture is increasingly hostile to God, faith, church, and religion. People of faith are increasingly seen as narrow-minded and bigoted. And not only is the pace of this change accelerating, but those who keep trying to keep a foot in both worlds find themselves increasingly and impossibly stretched.

 

 

Statistically – according to studies by Christian researcher George Barna – only about 9% of American Christians have quit straddling this divide and have rooted their whole lives (and both feet) in God, faith, and church. Let’s assume an equal 9% of those-who-call-themselves-Christian are totally sold out to the world. With both feet there, they are Christian-in-name-only. So where does that leave the remaining 82%? Trying to keep a foot in both camps. Straddling the great divide. And finding life increasingly impossible.

 

Scripture has a name for believers in this posture: Lukewarm. To some that may not initially sound too bad … that is until we read Jesus’ judgment against this state of spiritual compromise. To the church in Laodicea, these words were proclaimed: ““I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. But because you are lukewarm … I am about to spit you out of my mouth” - Revelation 3:15-16.

 

God-through-Moses proclaimed a message to God’s people … that powerfully relevant to us today. He said, “See, I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

 

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who is praying …

God,

I don’t want to live a divided life,

with one foot in the church and

one foot in a broken culture.

Help me take the hard

but life-giving step of

coming home fully to you.

 

Nov 8 - 1 Peter 5:6

 

Humble yourselves, therefore,

under God’s mighty hand, that

he may lift you up in due time.

1 Peter 5:6

 

I shook a man’s hand recently. It was huge. Like a tree trunk.

 

I shook, and he didn’t move.

 

He shook, and he almost through me across the room.

 

I almost asked, “Where did you play football?” I should have. I could have gotten an autograph. He was former Super Bowl champion!

 

That’s my most recent experience with a “mighty hand.” But while a defensive tackle’s hand is strong, “God’s mighty hand” is absolutely massive. It is powerful. With it, he parts the Red Sea and comforts a crying widow. With his mighty hand, God provides food for the hungry and protects his children from harm.

 

Biblically, it is an awesome gift when God’s hand of protection rests upon you. Israel, for example, was invincible when God guided and guarded them. Ezra once cheered – Ezra 8:22 – “Our God’s hand of protection is on all who worship him, but …” But is a hard word in Scripture. Throughout Scripture, God tends to bless the faithful … but … after seasons of rebellion, God would often remove his hand of protection and allow his people to fall into a different hand – the hand of the enemy.

 

So … do you know the secret of being blessed by “God’s mighty hand”? It is to “humble yourselves.”

 

Now, that’s a hard thing to do. God is so big. He’s mighty. He’s powerful. He could toss me further than a pro football player. Do I truly trust myself to his care? Will you really and truly humble yourself? Will you follow his ways? Will you trust that he knows better for you than you do?

 

Well, when you trust in the Lord, “God’s mighty hand [will] lift you up.” And if you don’t, then another hand will inevitably crush you.

 

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who trusts God’s

big hands to lift me up;

rather than death’s

inevitable fingers

to pull me down