(J. R. Miller)Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your affection sealed and laid awayuntil your friends are dead. Fill their present days with tenderness. Speak your words of commendation, while their ears can hear them! The things you mean to say when they are dead and gonesay before they go! The flowers you mean to send for their coffinssend beforehand to brighten and sweeten their homes, before they leave them forever!I have often saidand I know I speak for thousands of other weary, plodding toilersthat if my friends have vases laid away, filled with the perfumes of sympathy and affection, which they intend to break over my dead bodyI would far rather they would bring them out now along my toilsome days and open themwhen I can enjoy them and be refreshed by them!Post-mortem kindnesses do not cheer the burdened spirit. Tears falling on the icy brow of death, make poor and too tardy atonement for coldness, neglect, and cruel selfishness in life's long, struggling years. Appreciation, after the heart is stilled in deathhas no inspiration for the departed one; it comes too late, when it is pronounced only in funeral eulogies. Flowers piled on the coffincast no fragrance backward over weary days.
_________________CHRISTIAN
"Flowers piled on the coffincast no fragrance backward over weary days."
Excellent post. Many men despise emotions for in them they believe their is weakness and unreliability. Better to trust and to love than not to love at all for love is surely seen..........brother Frank
(Luke 7:11-15) "Soon afterward Jesus went with his disciples to the village of Nain, and a large crowd followed him. A funeral procession was coming out as he approached the village gate. The young man who had died was a widows only son, and a large crowd from the village was with her. When the Lord saw her, his heart overflowed with compassion. Dont cry! he said. Then he walked over to the coffin and touched it, and the bearers stopped. Young man, he said, I tell you, get up. Then the dead boy sat up and began to talk! And Jesus gave him back to his mother."(John 5:25, 26) "And I assure you that the time is coming, indeed its here now, when the dead will hear my voicethe voice of the Son of God. And those who listen will live. The Father has life in himself, and he has granted that same life-giving power to his Son."(Proverbs 18:21) "Words kill, words give life; they're either poison or fruit you choose."You only get about 70 or 80 (Psalm 90:10). Spend your life resuscitating the dead, encouraging the weary (Isaiah 50:4), and coming underneath people and esteeming them higher than yourself.