God allows us to die. That’s one of the truths of life, as painful as it may seem to us.

            God allows us to go through the frightful experience of dying. He doesn’t just whisk us away to heaven in a chariot of fire like the great prophet Elijah, or permit us to somehow skip the land of the dead and enter directly into his glorious kingdom. Instead, we first have to die before we can know what living in Christ is really all about.

            What the caterpillar calls the end, God calls a butterfly. To put a twist on the title of an old James Bond movie: Die, and let live.

            What better way to bring home that point than the story of Lazarus. Lazarus dies and is buried. Martha and her sister feel the pain of going through the death of a loved one. Even Jesus must suffer the mixture of remorse and disappointment that surrounds death.

            A young man was widowed and left alone with his six-year-old daughter. He had a hard time working through his own grief, but admitted that the hardest part was trying to comfort and explain the death to his daughter. Even with all he knew, he was left at a loss.

            One day as he and his little girl were standing on a busy street corner waiting for a light to change, a very large truck suddenly sped by

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