GOOD FRIDAY LUKE 23: 46 “…Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” When I was a boy the very first prayer that I learned was the bedtime prayer that went, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” It was a bedtime prayer asking God to watch over me and also to remind me that God would watch over me during the night. From the cross Jesus prayed, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” This is the bedtime prayer that each little Jewish child was taught in Jesus’s day here on earth. I think what Jesus was trying to tell us that, death is now merely sleep. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 says the same thing. And we know what happens when we sleep. The alarm goes off and we awake for another day. Paul says in that same book and chapter that when the trumpet sounds we will wake up to a new life. Thanks be to God that Christ has turned death into sleep. We wait now for that “great gettin’ up.” Amen