A girl was hit by a car and killed on the street in front of school today... I was speechless when I heard the news.  I felt as I had been struck.  So many things came to my mind, and after some reflection I have finally had a chance to nail down a few of them with words...

I suppose the first thing that bothered me was that her soul is now in eternity... and only God actually knows where she went.
As most of you know, I believe in one life and one death, and that if we are in this life that we can make a crucial choice about whether or not to accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior and follow Him.  Once we do die, I believe that our soul goes on into eternity in one of two places, heaven, which is a glory filled lifetime with God, or hell, which is a fire filled painful place of darkness away from God.

My thoughts then floated to how and what I could learn from this.... I thought about whether or not the girl knew that morning when she ran barefoot away from her tin-roof home that it would be her last... if her mother knew when she waved goodbye... sometimes I think that we can have a feeling about these things, like an instinct or a reminder in our hearts to cherish what we have...but perhaps that is more rare than we would like it to be, and even more likely, perhaps we are too busy to feel it.

I think that God does give us "reminders" in life, and that more often than not he uses other people to do so... today, for instance, I recognized that we not only need to be thankful to God for what we DO have, but also for what we do not.  That His grace is the reason I was not in the place of the girl in the street today, and that there is no other reason that I am kept alive.  

I am thankful that in 1 John 5:11 - 13 that God himself tells us this: