The Difference Between Us

On Saturday, I spent a large amount of time at a memorial service for a relative. At this service, I observed some things.

Everyone was united in one area, which is that all of them were sad. This makes sense of course, since death is an unhappy thing. Everyone pretty much agreed that this relative was a great guy while he was alive. But after that, things start to break down.

See, this group of sad people were subdivided into two seperate groups. One group consisted of people who said "he was a great guy, I really liked being around him." The other group had people that said, "he was a great guy, I'm really looking forward to seeing him again."

I've been part of one church or another for my entire life, so God and Christianity are both pretty embedded in my way of thinking. I'll admit, I don't entirely understand other viewpoints. But I can see how they work, and it seems to me that the one major difference between the two involves death and how it affects us.

Viewpoint 1 says that death is just the end of the body, but the beginning of something very different and vastly better.

Viewpoint 2 says that death is the end of everything.

Personally, I like viewpoint 1 a lot better. This doesn't mean, of course, that this one is more accurate than the other. It's just more attractive to me.

I have a lot more to say about these viewpoints, but I'd rather keep this post short. Maybe I'll ramble some more about it at a future point in time. Probably not.