I lost a friend last week. Don Mason was a lion of a man. He loved life and all it had to offer. More than just love it, with a grand “Carpe Diem!” he seized life, and rode it for all it was worth, never looking back, eyes ever fixed on the prize.
Don was an amazing entrepreneur. At no time during our relationship was he not in the process of building, running, loosing, or planning another venture. He was, and I use this term with the greatest affection, a rascal, always one step ahead of everyone else, and always happily on his way to his next fortune.
But my favorite part of Don Mason were those amazing stories. This man went places, saw things and performed deeds which most of us only dream of. He spun tales of escapades which seemed straight out of an action novel. The night that he, on a lark, gallivanted onto the palace grounds of the King of Morocco, performed some outrageous stunt, and turned - only to see the ugly snout of a tank coming over a nearby rise, with the Kings troops behind in hot pursuit.
Or the gin joint he ran in Biloxi, you know, the one where he ran bootleg liquor past the cops; yeah, they all knew his name… and the night a nobody named Elvis Presley came in looking for a manager. Well Elvis looked a little scruffy, so Don tossed him out on his ear, sending him down the street to the next bar, a place run by one Colonel Tom Parker. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Like I said, I lost a friend last week.
But, to me, at least, it is really more of a short farewell.
After all, will we all not also walk thru that same veil of death? That same veil through which our good friend so recently passed? I say that death is just a door, a door through which we will all someday walk.
And on the other side? On the other side we will awaken into a new life, an eternal life. A life of ever increasing spiritual growth until, after an age of experience, we will stand in the very presence of God.
And our friend Don Mason will be with us during that eternity adventure, upward and inward to Paradise. Just as he was with us for this short season of existence. As one man’s life is a mere flash in eternity, so shall be the brief season we are apart… long, very long seeming in the view of the flesh, but oh so brief in the eye of eternity.
So, in closing, I welcome my old friend to the short sleep of death. A well earned rest until the time when we shall, all of us, awaken on the Mansion Worlds to begin anew the eternal quest of perfection.
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