Lent Day 20

Dying.

We are all going to do it.  And yet people always seem to be surprised when it happens.

In the past few days I have been in conversation with several friends in different settings about people who have died ' before their time'.    'He was only 65'   ' She shouldn't have died, she wasn't even ill!'  I also have an 83 year old stepfather with terminal cancer and a 48 year old friend in the same boat.
We so easily think that at 83 you have had your time and its a good time to die, but that 48 is way too early.    I wonder why we think like that?

Its a funny thing  ( and I apologise for just thinking out loud here - I dont promise you Im going to reach any meaningful conclusion)  because death is most definitely difficult.   God never intended for us to die.  He created us to be eternal beings and its only because of the fall that death was allowed to have sway.  If we had lived eternally in our sinful state..... well can you imagine what the world would look like now.  Its bad enough when we all only get 70 or 80 years!     So death is necessary , but that doesnt mean it is what God intended in the beginning.   Satan has devised all manner of painful, horrible, brutal and violent ways to die.    My stepmother died of a stroke.  I remember watching her die in the hospital and being aware that life was being stolen from her in some ways. A stroke is an evil thing without a doubt.  It is theft and robbery.    And yet when she  took her final breaths I was also aware that she was being released from her body into eternity - which was a wonderful thing.   And there's the dilemma.

Ive been very cross today about the coverage of the helicopter crash in Argentina.  Ten people lost their lives but only three have been named in the news - and those are the three Olympians.   As if  having been good at their jobs made them better than the others who died - more valuable.   More worthy of comment and national grief.    Which is of course rubbish.  Olympians are just people like everyone else.   Im sure the other people who died were also good at what they did.  Excellent maybe.  But we havent been hearing about them.    Somehow the 'early' death of an athlete is more 'tragic' than the early death of a somebody else.

God says no.   We are ALL of inestimable value.  He was prepared to pay that terrible, ultimate price for each and every human being.  In order to defeat death and purchase us back from the fall.   The only tragedy in death is when someone dies who does not know this truth.  It's not a matter of how much time we get to spend here, but of how we prepare for where we are going next.