蜜芽传媒

Good morning. Once again, people have been savagely killed and injured as they went about their daily lives, this time with a van being deliberately driven into people in Toronto. Such attacks always generate a sense of terror, whatever their motives. They highlight how vulnerable we are to random acts of violence that destroy so many lives.

Yet sometimes I think that fear itself has become one of the greatest enemies we face. We live in an all-pervasive culture of risk aversion, and many of our daily freedoms are being taken away in the name of security. Every week some new warning emerges related to lifestyle or diet that we are told will shorten our lives.

I鈥檓 not suggesting that we should ignore valid health warnings rooted in reliable science, nor that we should deny the urgent need to change our way of living to protect the environment. But we are all going to die nonetheless, and we are all going to experience the grief that comes with the death of a loved one.

Matt Campbell鈥檚 family know what that feels like, and our hearts go out to them. He died last Sunday at the age of 29 while running the London marathon. He鈥檇 been a semi-finalist in Masterchef, and he was running in memory of his father who died suddenly eighteen months ago. He was raising money for a trust that works with vulnerable young people. It鈥檚 impossible to imagine his family鈥檚 sorrow. Yet I hope that there鈥檚 comfort too, in remembering a life that was lived so fully and so well. That young man turned the grief of losing his father into an inspiration for living. His death, though deeply tragic, was quite different from those deaths in Toronto.

Wanton and deliberate killing rightly fills us with a sense of outrage and horror, but death itself is not an outrage. It鈥檚 the only thing we can be sure of in life, and the mourning and loss that accompany it are part of what it means to be human. We can鈥檛 avoid life鈥檚 losses and sorrows, but fear saps the sweetness of the good times and brings an added burden to the hard times.

Jesus asked his followers, 鈥淲ho of you by worrying can add a single hour to their lifespan?鈥� (Matthew 6:27) In his short life he endured the worst experiences that anyone can go through 鈥� his family were refugees fleeing tyrannical violence, his closest companion John the Baptist was brutally killed, he was betrayed and abandoned by his friends, and he was tortured to death in his early thirties. Yet in his three years of public ministry he changed the world 鈥� not by writing a book, not by earning a fortune, not by ruling a country 鈥� but simply by showing the people around him what it means to live life to the full. That means living in the fullness of our grief and our joy, but also learning the hardest lesson of all 鈥� do not be afraid.

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