Download LifeDate Summer 2025 – Every Life Is a Story
by Pastor Michael Salemink
Sometimes the sanctity of life means goodbye.
It takes an open heart and empty hands to receive. Getting hold of the life right in front of us as a gift and a privilege can include letting go of our own desires, designs, and demands. Surprise pregnancy, terminal diagnosis, and other life issue situations often come with griefs.
But grief has a sacred dimension. The Lord Himself laments in the Scriptures, and even Jesus wept. It testifies that persons, relationships, and experiences have mattered. Somehow lives need sharing and not just asserting, and selves need belonging instead of only indulging. Goodbyes become holy when they affirm one another’s worth, purpose, and servanthood.
After ten years as your Executive Director, I’m moving on. Our Gospel-motivated voices have to articulate (at least a kind of) a goodbye to each other. How shall we pronounce it? Perhaps the following few reflections can apprehend and encapsulate a sanctity-of-life way to say goodbye.
This hurts. The one Father-Son-Spirit God made humankind in His image for togetherness. We actually have severe allergies to distance, division, and death. Our hearts need connection and unity even more than independence or autonomy. The ache, the anxiety, even the anger of separation remind us of it. And our Lord and Savior mourns it with us.
I’m sorry. Only sinfulness pulls us apart, and my own fallen nature has contributed to it. My vanity and my transgressions have tarnished the interactions we’ve had. You and I have encountered, endured, and at times even inflicted difficulties. Please forgive every way in which I haven’t celebrated or safeguarded your dignity.
Thank you. Your life has embodied heavenly blessings. Your character has brought me irreplaceable delight. Your presence draws and drives me away from slavery to myself and into relief and freedom. Your fellowship has become an agent and expression of God’s own grace. Rather than resenting or deserving your company, I remain indebted to you for it.
I’ll not forget you. Our Creator Incarnate has configured us for leaving fingermarks and signatures just like He does. Every personality, every identity and history and destiny, consists in part of the imprints neighbors have left. I’m keeping pieces of you, and you’re taking some of me. Humanity just works that kind of magic. Your being and your doing have changed me for the better.
Go in peace. I hold no ill will toward you. The abundant love of the Lord Jesus Christ more than makes up for any mistakes or failures. In trust I surrender my priorities and plans to His wise timing and His good and gracious will. I know the call of God is carrying us both to something greater.
I can’t wait to see you again. I’m already looking forward to the reunions promised in the Gospel of resurrection to everlasting life in the innumerable multitude of the new heavens and earth. The arms and intersections of Christ’s cross make every parting only temporary. Completion of the good work He has begun in us will include meeting over and over forever and ever.
Into the Father’s hands I commend. He who introduced us cannot fail to preserve, protect, and provide for us still. Whatever He has devised for each of us, and however He will direct us to it, far exceeds anything we could intend or imagine. Even in absence I will not disregard you, because I will pray for you constantly as we continually watch and reach for the same communion of saints.