Funerals are such strange affairs. Rather like a class reunion with the highly noticeable difference that there's a dead person in one end of the room. People in very mercurial emotional states wander around the room greeting people they haven't seen in years, people they see everyday, and people they've never met. People with one thing in common...their lives were all touched, blessed in some way by knowing
Chuck. These people, all gathered together, reminiscing, whispering prayers...these people, these lives he affected, are Chuck's living legacy.

I suppose it's probably for the best that they had an open-casket viewing. If I hadn't seen with my own eyes, I could scarcely believe Chuck had died. He was only a few years older than me. He made an abrupt transition from Time into Eternity by tumbling over a 300 ft cliff along with the bulldozer he was operating and impacting next to a small stream in the San Gabriel mountains.

He could always be counted on for a smile or some gentle humor when I needed it most. He ate at least three helpings of our infamous potato salad. He was the person who put me under(and even let me up again!!) when I was baptized some 25 years ago.

I hadn't actually seen or heard from Chuck in almost 20 years. I'm not sure how missing him now that he's gone Home is different from missing him because of the loss of contact, but it is. It's like the whole world has lost a degree of color and brilliance. Things here are subtly greyer now. But, in Heaven, they're having a celebration, a reunion, a hero's welcome. Angels are dancing. Chuck is reunited with loved ones who have gone before him, the ones he has missed the way I now miss him.

This is so different from losing my father a couple years ago. I was devastated beyond belief, made inconsolable by the same scriptures that had always been my solace and my hope. In the end, all I could do was leave my unsaved, rabidly anti-Christian father in the nail-scarred hands of One Who loves him even more than I do.

Yes, I miss Chuck. But there's a peace that rounds the jagged edges of my loss. That peace is none other than the difference between "Farewell" and "Until we meet again." Because one day I will see Chuck again. One day I, too, will go Home to a reunion, a hero's welcome.