Kenneth Fearing, the poet, describes a particularly long and wearisome day in one woman's life. (William Dols, Just Because It Didn't Happen..., "I Say to You, 'Arise!'")  Evening finally comes.  The house is quiet at last.  The children have been tucked into bed and are asleep.  She sits in the family room with her husband and they lose themselves in the blur of the images on the television.  They talk a little, but not enough.  They try to make time pass with a drink.  Then the eleven o'clock news is over, and she says she will go up to bed.  She asks, "Are you coming soon?"  He replies with, "In a minute."  But as she heads toward the stairs, she hears him switch the channel to a late show and she knows that it will be another hour or so of watching, and she will drop off to sleep alone again.  As she climbs the stairs in the dark, she does a silly thing that she did as a child when she was afraid.  She counts the number of steps.  And, then, not really wanting to and wishing that she had not, she asks herself:  Did you sometime or somewhere have a different idea?  She pauses for an instant.  Should she go upstairs alone or return downstairs alone?  And the reality of her soul's death causes her to wonder for the first time in her life:  Is this what I was born to feel and to do and to be?

It is at these moments that the power of the gospel has opportunity to shine.  Robert Capon has said, "Jesus came to raise the dead.  The only qualification for the gift of the Gospel is to be dead.  You do not have to be smart.  You do not have to be good.  You do not have to be wise.  You do not have to be wonderful.  You do not have to be anything...you just have to be dead.  That's it."