The day you die is better than the day you are born.
Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties.
After all, everyone dies—so the living should take this to heart.
Sorrow is better than laughter, for sadness has a refining influence on us.
A wise person thinks a lot about death,
while a fool thinks only about having a good time.
-Ecclesiastes 7:1-4

I spent the weekend with one of my buddies that I've been friends with since high school. Twenty five years is a long time to share the journey of life and you end up influencing one another in various ways over time. My friend loves the action/horror genre of entertainment, anything with a gun, a high body count and something with a creepy edge to it. I have generally been more of a fantasy, science fiction type of guy with almost no interest in horror or gore. I'm a fan of the cut away scene more than the slow motion decapitation.

This weekend we compromised with a feast of films and TV that tipped back and forth to what geeks each of us up. I chose Prometheus, he chose Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. I turned him on to iPad comics, he turned me on to The Walking Dead. He had me eating dead animals all weekend with his Paleo diet and I introduced him to grains and beans with homemade granola and Bee House brewed coffee from Indaba.

The themes of life and death wove throughout our conversations over the last four days. In 25 years you see a lot of trauma and drama and it shapes you deeply and sometimes buries you, but life goes on.

When I was younger, I wanted only light. I feared the dark. But the older I get the more I find that there is a godly wisdom in the shadows cast by suffering, evil and death. God uses it all and is found in every chapter, even if sometimes you have to read between the lines.

"Even the darkness is not dark to You, And the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to you," Psalms 139:12.

I found these truths woven throughout the fictional narratives in all the stories we shared together this weekend, just one more reason I believe in the power of story to shape lives and communicate truth.

The longer we walk on this planet, the more we learn that life keeps coming back. We spend most of our days trying to figure out if its dusk or dawn but eventually we come to know that death isn't ever really the end.