Finalizing the Final Affairs - Martin Wiles

Set your affairs in order, for you are going to die. You will not recover from this illness. 2 Kings 20:1 NLT

Handling final affairs can be sobering but helpful.

Sometime before my father died, he arranged most of his final affairs. Although he never visited the funeral home and selected a casket, he did have his order of service mapped out, as well as a burial site chosen. This made it much easier on Mom and us boys when he died.

Later, when Mom remarried, she and her new husband went even further. Even though they decided to keep the original burial plots they had selected from previous marriages, they redrew their wills. Mom, too, has planned out her funeral service. The only thing we three sons will have to do is choose her casket.

Finalizing our final affairs isn’t pleasant, but it’s wise. King Hezekiah faced his mortality when he became deathly ill. Isaiah the prophet visited him and told him to arrange his affairs. He would soon die.

A loved one’s death is taxing on a family. Having a will made so a particular state can’t take what doesn’t belong to them—or so the family members won’t get bottled up in legal battles as they divide the loved one’s estate--is vital. What a will states doesn’t always please family members, but having one is still more advantageous than not.

Picking out a burial plot and then taking a trip to the funeral home to select a casket and make arrangements to pay for final affairs isn’t a bad idea either. No one enjoys facing their mortality, but already having the final details taken care of gives the family more time to grieve properly.

Whether or not we want it to be, life is brief—even when it’s eighty or more years. Anne Bradstreet, one of the two noted poets from Puritan America—in writing of the death of her grandchild—wrote:

Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate

Sith thou are settled in an everlasting state.

Though life is tenuous and uncertain—as is proven every day by terrorist acts, natural disasters, and other tragedies--we don’t have to live with fear. Bradstreet concluded her poem with the line: “Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.”

Planning your final affairs is prudent; ensuring your life is securely in God’s care is even more so.

Father, knowing life is precious but brief, help me to live prepared to meet you. 

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