Soul Set Free by John Lindell

Author:John Lindell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charisma House
Published: 2019-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

DEAD TO SIN

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?

—ROMANS 6:1–2, NRSV

DEBBIE AND I were both only nineteen years old when we got married in Wisconsin. I had just finished up my sophomore year at Central Bible College. We had moved back to Colorado to work for the summer, and we were living in a house that actually used to be a chicken coop! But we were young, we were newlyweds, and being able to live together was way more important than where we lived! The more pressing problem was that we needed to move back to Springfield, but we had no idea where we were going to live or what kind of jobs we could get. When I think of our lack of planning and preparation, I still can’t believe her parents let us get married!

Every day we would pray and ask God to open doors for us—for a place to live and a place to work. One day, out of the blue, I got a call from a funeral home in Springfield. The owner told me he’d heard I was going to be a junior in college and that I was recently married. He wondered if I would want to work at the funeral home. He said we could live in the funeral home rent-free and they would pay me a salary with the understanding that I’d be going to school during the day and then work for them on afternoons and evenings.

To be sure, working in a funeral home was not something that had even entered my mind. If you are a funeral director, the Lord bless you—but I said I’d need a little time to think about it. The owner said he couldn’t hold the job for long, but that he was willing to give me three days. I got off the phone and told Debbie about the job offer. She asked me, “Well, what did you say?”

“I told him I’d have to think about it.”

“Um, what is there to think about? We need a place to live, you need a job, and now we’ll have both. I mean, come on. It’s all right there. What is there to think about?”

“Well now wait a minute,” I said. “You’re not going to be the one doing it . . . I will!”

We proceeded to have a little discussion about what it would actually mean to work at a funeral home. In a comic bit of poetic justice, the first night we lived there, about midnight, I got my first call. A person had passed away, and I was to accompany one of the funeral directors to the morgue. That meant Debbie would be alone in the mortuary. And business just then was, shall we say, very good! There were six individuals who just weren’t very talkative!

Any of us who have been around for a while have probably lived in closer proximity to death than we are comfortable with.

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