No Need To Worry?

No Need to Worry?

O death, where is your victory?O death, where is your sting?

1 Corinthians 15:55

For us as normal human beings, the thought of dying is disconcerting, to say the least. It is hard to get past the idea that death is the end of life as we know it. It is doubly hard, as the old hymn says, to “think of a home over there” in heaven. Heaven seems so far away and ethereal that we tend to simply ignore the fact that death is inevitable for each of us at some point.

That denial and avoidance play out in many ways in our lives. For instance, even though we know our lives on earth cannot go on forever, we may not have our wills drawn up, we do not buy enough life insurance, we do not buy mortgage pay-off insurance, and we do not prepurchase funeral plans and burial plots. Somehow, dealing with those end-of-life chores feels as if we are bringing death to ourselves sooner than it would otherwise come.

One old-timer had been sick in bed for several weeks. The local doctors had been unable to help him or to diagnose his problem. The old codger insisted that he did not need anybody’s help, but over his continuing protests, his family called in various specialists to see whether any of them could pinpoint what the problem was.

When all the specialists had come and gone, the old man’s relatives asked him what the doctors had said about his condition.

“Told you I was all right,” he said triumphantly. “Them gentlemen used a lot of big words I couldn’t understand, but they finally said, ‘Well, no use worrying about it or arguing over it. We will get the answer soon enough from the autopsy.’”

In other words, the patient was standing at death’s door, and the doctors were trying to pull him through.

God of life, thank you for the assurance that heaven is on the other side of death’s door. Help us to live in the light of that truth. Amen.