Momento Mori

I was scrolling Facebook when I first encountered the phrase. Targeted ads were selling coffee mugs and t-shirts featuring a skull and two Latin words: Memento Mori.

My first reaction was, who would want to drink coffee out of a skull? It felt morbid. A little gross, honestly.

But the phrase kept appearing, so I looked it up. What I found surprised me.

Memento Mori — “Remember that you will die” — is not a celebration of death. It is an ancient Christian practice of honest reckoning. The medieval church embraced it not to be morbid but to be awake. To remember that our days are numbered is to remember that our days are precious. You cannot learn to steward life well if you refuse to admit it will end.

As the psalmist prayed, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

This Lent, my Wednesday night congregation is walking through a series by that name.

We have already spent time together on Heaven and Hell — the Good Place and the Bad Place. Now it is time to confront our own mortality. Not to celebrate death, but to maximize life.

How do we respond to our mortality and the mortality of others? How do we face death?

By recognizing the gift of life, stewarding it well, and remembering that for Christians, resurrection is the remedy for death. Now matters. But now is not the end. There is still eternity.

Learning to Number Our Days

This series has been forming in me through real loss.

Lorie and I buried her mother unexpectedly this past year. I have watched my father’s siblings pass one by one, leaving only one remaining — my last living connection to my dad. These things weigh on you in ways that are hard to articulate.

But the clearest teacher was a hospice patient I visited last year.

For a while, he told me, he would wake up each morning upset that he was still alive. Then something changed.

“I realized,” he said, “that when I wake up, that was a day that the Lord had given me. I have a reason I’m still here. I don’t know what it is, but I will live with that purpose in mind.”

When he passed, he gifted me a collection of his spiritual reading books. The last month of his life was a blessing to mine.

Mortality has a way of clarifying things. It strips away illusion. And in that clarity, it often exposes something else we carry quietly: a longing for God’s presence, and an ache when that presence feels hidden.

When God Feels Hard to Find

I am not much for poetry. But I have found in musical poetry the discovery of deep truths — I often sing before I understand, and then eventually understanding comes.

For my generation, no one was a better Christian poet than Rich Mullins.

The song I keep returning to is called “Hard to Get.” It is one of the most courageous prayers ever set to music — a man pushing against God the way Jacob wrestled the angel, not from unbelief but from a faith too stubborn to let go.

Mullins names the loneliness, the screaming voices, the shame, the doubt. He asks God if he remembers what it was like down here. And then, finally, the surrender:

“And so You’ve been here all along I guess… it’s just Your ways and You are just plain hard to get.”

The pun is doing real theological work.

“Playing hard to get” implies God is coy, withholding, making you chase him.

“Just plain hard to get” is different. It is not a game. It is the nature of God himself — inscrutable, beyond our reach.

And Mullins lands there not in despair but in surrender:

“I’m lost enough to let myself be led.”

I will introduce this song later in the series. For now, hold onto that last line.

Nine Days

The final week of this series falls on March 25 — nine days before Good Friday.

When I made that plan, curiosity got the better of me. I remembered that Rich had recorded this song shortly before his death. I looked it up.

“Hard to Get” is a demo — recorded on a microcassette, in an abandoned church, with nothing but Rich, his guitar, and the acoustics of an empty room where God’s people no longer gathered.

He recorded it on September 10, 1997.

Nine days before he died.

Nine days after recording a song about a God who feels absent, Rich Mullins met Him face to face.

And nine days before we commemorate the death of the One who defeated death, we will remember that same truth together.

The absence became presence. For Rich.

And for us — Good Friday becomes Easter.

Dust and Gospel

The series begins the Wednesday after Ash Wednesday. But it is on Ash Wednesday itself that I impose the ashes and speak the ancient words of the liturgy:

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Repent and believe the Gospel.”

Both admonitions together already contain everything.

Mortality and resurrection.
Dust and repentance.
Death and life.

The ancient church already knew what this series needed to say.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Repent and believe the Gospel.

And dust you shall not remain.