Some Cheery Thoughts on Death

I was sitting with a group of church women I don’t know well, talking about a lot of things, when the subject of death came up. One woman said, “I just don’t know how I’d respond if I found out I only had a few months to live. I don’t want to find out. I hope I just drop dead.”

I offered up to the group my hypothesis on facing death: that we become a more extreme version of who we already are. One who feels angry and hopeless will experience more extreme anger and hopelessness. One who feels grateful and hopeful will feel extra measures of those emotions. One who has spent a lifetime hungering for face-to-face fellowship with their Creator will be like a weary traveler pulling into a five-star hotel.

It puzzles me that so many followers of Christ are just as squeamish and fearful about death as those who don’t believe in an afterlife. If we really believe that heaven is our true home, why do we live in fear and dread of getting there? Is it the journey, which may be painful and humiliating, that we fear? Or the sadness of being separated from the people we love? It’s a lot of things, I’m sure, but it’s too bad those things take our eyes off the prize.

I remember that after my dad died, I would think of him all the time and try to imagine what he was doing. I knew even less about heaven then than I do now (which is not much), but I would get a little twinge of excitement just thinking about what it might be like. I still do. I’ve been trying for a couple years to get through Randy Alcorn’s book, Heaven. The editor in me wants to dive into it with a red pen (I think it should be half the length it is), but I do love his proposition that heaven is filled with culture—music, literature, drama, sports, architecture—far beyond what we find on earth. The picture he paints is much more compelling than the harp-playing, cloud-floating image many of us carry in our heads. 

Most of us will get a chance to test my hypothesis. The leading "killers," cancer and heart disease, don’t happen overnight. They allow their victims time to settle into the idea of death. Time to figure out who they’re going to be for the rest of their life. Unlike the lady I met last week, I hope I do get a chance to find out who I’ll be. I hope I’ll run the last leg of my life with genuine joy and anticipation. And I hope I get a lot of stretching time before that race begins!