O, Death

Last night, the Happy Chicken Egg Farmers (my family) buried our first happy chicken. Her name was Buffy. We raised her from the little ball of fluff she was 16 months ago. Buffy was always the overachiever of our chicks—the first to flap her wigs and scoot across the pen, the first to roost, and one of the first to lay an egg. I suppose it's fitting that she was the first to die. Except who knew you could get so attached to a chicken? The irony of it all, when my freezer is full of dead chicken. But I suspect those chickens didn't have names. They didn't have little girls telling them each night, "I love you, Buff." And at the end of their lives, they weren't cradled on the front lawn by a weeping 12-year-old who did genuinely love them. 

Who knew that raising chickens wasn't for the faint of heart? I look at our 14 who remain and think, "Ugh, 14 more times we've got to do this?" Maybe it will get easier, but maybe not. I'm not sure that "death" and "easy" can coexist in the same sentence, let alone in real life. 

We get our kids pets so they can practice loving and caring, but also so they can practice losing. We tell them that death is a part of life and that they need to make peace with it. I've said those words myself. Yet something in me recoils from that. Deep down within me, I know I'm not supposed to make peace with death. This is not the way it's supposed to be. God did not create us for death. He created us for life! Death is our consequence, but it's also our enemy—1 Corinthians 15:26 says it will be the last enemy to be destroyed when Jesus returns.

I try to imagine death through the eyes of the incarnate Christ. Did He love and lose a pet as a little boy? Did He think, "Wait a minute! That's not how we designed it"? I wonder if He was right there, watching His grandparents grow old and die, or maybe Joseph, His earthly father? How unnatural it must have seemed. We know that He wept over the death of his friend Lazarus. Perhaps He was crying as much about death itself as He was about Lazarus. And then to experience death Himself--how alien, foreign, and completely at odds with Himself that was. Can we even imagine it?  

I don't fear death, not for myself anyway. It's my gateway to Jesus, and I'll do anything to get to live with Him and know Him face to face. But I cannot make peace with death. I can't tell my children, "This is natural." Everything in me knows that's not true. When you see a beautifully alive creature wither, struggle, and die right before your very eyes, you can't say it's natural. Common, yes, but not natural. I've seen it happen to people I loved, and nothing about it was natural or peaceful.

My kids are learning that we must expect and accept death as part of life in a fallen world. But I also want them to fiercely believe—more than they believe anything else in the world—that death doesn't get the last word. All of creation may be groaning with the pains from this world (Romans 8:22), but it's not a hopeless groan. It's an expectant groan. 

I hate you, death. I cannot wait for your defeat, and I know that it's coming.

"When our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled:

'Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting? . . . 

Thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ." (1 Corinthians 15:54-56)