How do you understand death?
Many people view it as an
interruption. Emily Dickinson captures this so eloquently when she says,
"because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me." One
day death will stop for each of us. We can resent his coming or play word
games to avoid mentioning it. We can not avoid him.
Sometimes our society treats death like an enemy, instead a
God-designed aspect of human life. Doctors will frequently start to ignore
a patient when it looks like their art or science will not prevent the
inevitable. Physicians and healthcare workers may need to be reminded that
they continue to have an important healing role to play for both the
terminally ill patient and for his/her family. Not only does pain need to
be appropriately managed, but also information needs to be dispensed. What
are we to expect? How can we adjust to diminishing abilities? Will there
be both good days and bad days? Questions need to be answered and fears
confronted.
Psalm 90 says:
The length of our days is seventy years__ or eighty, if we have the
strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass,
and we fly away...
Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
What does it mean to have a heart of wisdom? I think it means to come
to the following understandings:
Death is an integral part of life.
This means that God designed are bodies to fail, to wear out. The
apostle Paul writes:
Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a
building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.
(II Corinthians 5:1)
Even those of us who love to camp would not want to live in a tent for
ever. Tents are made to be folded down and put away. The body is made to
die. But the eternal body is as much more suitable for us, as a house is
better than a tent.
For Christians death is total
discontinuity This means that everything about heaven is different from our
experience on earth. Nothing we have on earth is of any value in heaven.
Christians do not need to stuff their tombs with items for use in the
world beyond the way the Egyptians did. The Apostle Paul writes:
"No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has
conceived what God has prepared for those who love him"
I Corinthians 2:9
If God totally remakes us for a different type of existence beyond our
deaths (resurrection) then Christians should have no problem with
cremation as a funeral process. We also should be wise stewards of our
body and provide for organ donation and tissue transplants. In Death, Relationships are all that matters.
No one ever says on their death beds, "gee, I wish I’d spent more time
at my workplace," or "I wish I had spent less time with my loved ones and
more time watching TV." Life will one day be evaluated by how we have
loved. Mending broken relationships, saying what needs to be said to those
we love, and getting our affairs in order so that they reflect our
appreciation for our relationships, is the hard work of leaving this
earth.
The only thing we take with us into heaven is our relationships,
particularly our relationship with God. Psalm 23 is a favorite passage at
funerals, because it talks about how our relationship with the Lord
continues on from this life into the next.
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