This has been one of those weeks that you were just so thankful came to an end. I'm so grateful that God promises His mercies are new every morning. If they weren't, how could we ever survive?

On Friday, I attended the saddest funeral I have ever been to in my life. One of Jeff's co-workers and friends lost his 17-week pregnant wife on Tuesday. She wasn't sick, but had been complaining of abdominal pain for a few days. What pregnant woman doesn't? But on Tuesday morning, her husband kissed her goodbye and went to work, telling her to keep him posted on how she felt. That was the last time he saw her alive.

A few hours later he got a call from a frantic neighbor saying they were taking her by ambulance to the hospital. She had come to take her to the doctor and found her in a semi-conscious state at the foot of their stairs. On the way to the hospital, she coded. So when her husband met her at the Emergency Room he was confronted with the image of his wife receiving chest compressions.

Jeff went to the hospital to be with his friend. The doctors were able to get her pulse back and she stabilized for a brief time. But they knew she was bleeding internally and had to find out where it was coming from. During surgery they were unable to stop the bleeding and her heart eventually gave out. Jeff watched the life completely drain from his friend's face as the doctors told him they had exhausted all of their efforts but were unable to save her. He saw his entire world fall apart with those brief words.

As the news spread, everyone was just in utter shock. She was 33 years old. They had been married a little over a year and she was not quite halfway into her first pregnancy. Things like this are not supposed to happen. But we live in a world where things are not as they were meant to be.

As I listened to our pastor speak at the funeral, I was comforted by his words. He didn't try to make excuses for God. He knew there was nothing to do with the pain but to embrace it and work through it. But his words have stuck with me this weekend. He said, "The pain is not from having known her and lost her. The pain would have been in never having known her at all." He asked her widowed husband, "Suppose God had come to you last July and told you that you could have her completely to love and enjoy, but it would only be for about 400 days. After that, He was coming back for her. Would you have taken Him up on it? Every time." He asked the same thing of her parents. As they nodded, the tears just flowed.

He said that in times like these you might be tempted to just give up. Life's not fair; what's the point of believing in anything? And he said, "But her very life spoke against that. She believed. She knew that this world was not her home." He said, "How can you know that God kept his promise to her? Because he kept His promise to her while she was on this earth. He promised to so radically change her on the inside that her life on the outside would have an amazing impact on everyone she came in contact with. You knew her better than I did. Tell me; didn't He do just that? If He kept His promise to her while she was here on earth, how much more do you think He'll keep His promise of things to come?"

I've been so moved by that thought over the past few days. I want to be so radically different on the inside that I make an impact on everyone I come in contact with. I want to spread the aroma of Christ wherever I go and have it linger when I'm gone. May it be that way with all of us.