Prayer for dads

Father, the news this week has at least three deaths in it — a neighbor's mother, a cousin's friend, a public figure I knew about. Death is real. So is its defeat. Your Word says that through death, Jesus destroyed the one who had the power of death, that is, the devil. Death undone by death. Let me hold both this morning. I will not pretend the deaths around me do not hurt. I will also not act as if death is the final word. Christ's resurrection is the actual final word, and it changes how I show up at funerals, how I hold my own aging, how I love the people who will outlive me. Make me a man whose grief is honest and whose hope is durable. Amen.