Tag: death

For A Time

I’m sitting here trying to contemplate life and the endless cycle. The grief-torn world we live in; the startling reality that we all must die at some point, not knowing when or where…it’s inescapable.

For a time we are here…

Waking up, going to work, getting the groceries, filling our days with tasks that feel like they are endless and piling up. Brush your teeth, make the coffee, get dressed. It gets monotonous and aggravating at times, and even on the good days, chores are always there.

We get hung up on the material, when can I buy that house? When will I be able to get that promotion or new job? There is always a brighter future around the corner.

We are faced with challenges, like anxiety, depression, and other health-related issues that cause us to question our existence in this world, clinging to Jesus, and trying to hold fast to the hope that will drown out the fear of whatever the future has in store.

Sometimes we look longingly at the future, and other times we despise it; fearful it may cause more issues than in the present.

But the future, is a privilege, that some are denied. But here again, I say, for a time such as this, we are here.

No amount of money or status will make me happy. While I fall into the lie that I need more, in this consumer world, in this earthly body, I need more. My sinful nature craves excess materials such as clothes, food, and money. But also, my heart longs for the community, and to be known by my friends, and by people, to have something in a Wikipedia article that will live on the internet.

But earlier today I passed by a cemetery, every one of those tombstones has a life and a story that not everyone will know. Not everyone will make their mark in the world, but dare I say, that the most small, town grandma can speak into her children’s and grandchildren’s lives and create a legacy. A friend gone too soon can cause a ripple effect in other people’s lives and make Christ known even after death. A little boy, far too young, proclaiming Jesus is still good through his death by his parents.

We all long for more time with our loved ones. No amount will truly satisfy us even if we spend every second of the day with those who are now gone.

The desire to have more and more creates a desire that only can exist within our heavenly home, to be one with Christ, who is outside of time. Outside of the care of this world.

Christ is relational. He calls us to grow as a body, He calls us to foster relationships, to be kind to one another, and to love one another as a forecast of His love. How easily we get sucked in the day-to-day that we forget why we are here. And we forget that time is a currency that can not be gained back.

As Christians, as God’s people, we are here to hold fast to our relationships. Sometimes it’s not the most comfortable, sometimes you have to stay up late and talk all night about whatever it may be; sometimes you need to give hugs and show sympathy even if you’re having a bad day yourself. Sometimes, we have to forget ourselves to be a friend to others.

Friendships are the kind of love that is not romantic but is the hardest because friendships of various levels don’t all have the same expectations, there is a hierarchy of friendships in everyone’s lives. Still, I’m challenging myself and you, to look outside the hierarchy and just love the people in your life.

And the other types of love, family especially…call more. Go to them more. Ask them to hang out more. Be present with them.

For a time we are here. For a time like this, we must not wait. For a time such as this, we must love and cherish.

But for a time it is!

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace

What do workers gain from their toil?  I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.  I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live.  That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.  I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-14

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

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We don’t fully know nor understand something until we experience it for ourselves.

Not death; not heartbreak; not terminal diseases…not even something extremely anticlimactic like failing a class or hitting way below average on an exam score.

As John Keats once wrote “Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced.” 

But as I’m sitting here in the car…watching the clouds sit peacefully in the sky, the words keep coming to me.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Those words have been echoing in my head since I read them.

I can’t.

But I will.

Because I must.

Even though I may not be terminally ill, as my health seems to be thriving at the moment, this goes with every painful experience we face. To the terminally ill, to the depressed, to the anxiety, to the heartbreaks…we will go on. You will continue live.

As John 1:5 says, “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” 

After reading When Breath Becomes Air, I decided to skim through Ecclesiastes again. Let me tell you, Solomon is one depressing guy.

“I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” – Ecclesiastes 1:14

Wisdom, pleasure, riches, folly, toil, and so forth are all meaningless. Solomon points us to find God-conscious joy (for more clarity I encourage you to read this article here),

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi is a beautiful and simplistic read full of raw truth.

Death is a final outcome of everything we accomplish in life. We don’t think about that though… as Paul Kalanithi said most of us live with a passivity toward it. A a neurosurgeon he actively engaged in it, consoling his patients into acceptance and rationality, but until he became a patient himself, he did not fully understand the pain in which suffering entails. He talks of his stages of grief in reverse, how he started from acceptance and moved to denial. Uncertain of how much time he had left; trying to grasp for the numbers. If he knew how much time, he would do things differently.

But as I sat in the car this afternoon, I thought of myself dying in a car crash that very second. Knowing that there is always a possible outcome of death, terminally ill or not, will I choose to live differently?

Even though Paul knew death was his fate, he refused to act as if he were dying. To choose to live and face the outcome we are all surely are going to face, that is a strength we will not know unless we experience it ourselves. As he said, even if he was dying, until he was dead, he still was living.

As Tim McGraw sings “lets live like we are dying..” why not live like we are living?

Having worked in the medical field myself for four years, I understood a sense of what Paul’s run in with terminal patients felt like. I understood the desensitized feelings. When his young doctor came in to check on him and was checking off the boxes. How many times did I do that when taking care of a patient? Many. Countless. So I could get onto the next one and clock out.

Human sympathy is a strange thing, the more it is pushed, the more apathetic we become, until we feel nothing at all.

Paul’s measure of what makes life worth living  is something to learn from. Even though his manuscript went unfinished, his final written words to his daughter are this:

“When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”