In the Way You Face Death
The Difference Christ Makes
In the Way You Face Death
"Dear Genie Price, I have a wonderful story of God's Love to tell you. I had just returned from the doctor's office where I had learned that I was two months pregnant. My heart was so heavy. I already had five healthy children and wondered why this had happened. I wasn't ready to face another ordeal such as childbirth has been for me. Then about seven o'clock that same day, my sister called to say my father had passed away . . . . A few months later, my husband's father died of a brain tumor. In the meantime my mother had been hospitalized with a kidney infection. She had expected to go home on Wednesday, but grew worse, underwent surgery and died in just three weeks. My mother and father and my father-in-law all three in such a short time. But honestly, I feel as though I have just been converted! God has been so good and has taught me many new ways to lay hold of His grace. I suppose we never really learn until we are forced to. Although this has been a heartbreaking time, I thank God for all of it. I just wanted to share this
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great experience of His Love with you. Surely, Jesus is Lord!"
"Dear Genie, It's Christmas Day and for the first time in three years I am glad it is Christmas. For me, it is deep with the reality of Christ. Nothing can ever, ever shake me from the belief that it was God who was born in that old rough manger that first Christmas. I know it was God because only God could put joy back into Christmas for me! I know you know about my mother's death, but somehow I've never been able to tell you that she committed suicide on Christmas Day. My darling mother, whom I loved so much. And for whom life was just too heavy to carry around any more. I've fought God every inch of the way. Why did she have to leap from a bridge into that icy river on Christmas Day! I screamed my question at Him over and over, but now that my own life is linked to the Life of Christ. He has quieted my questioning with His Love. I can leave all things in His dear hands and know that all is well somehow. I don't understand any more than I did, but I don't fight to understand any more. Learning something of what He is really like has quieted my heart and my mind. I am loving all of life this Christmas Day and that is surely a miracle of Love."
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? . . . Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
How? How does God give a victory when the house is so empty? How does God give a victory when we have wept so much that any more tears will have to come from our broken hearts? Isn't there a new, cruel sting every morning when sleep fades and realization lashes at us all over again? Hasn't the grave won? Isn't all that we loved of that beloved one lying there under the ground?
"Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
How does He do it? Words become stubborn, useless things
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when we try to explain. But to the hearts of those among us who have lost loved ones by death, there is a deep knowing that He does. We still weep. But that's all right. "Jesus wept." The house is still empty. The family still has to talk a lot more and try to think of funny things to say in order to keep everyone's mind off the empty place at the table. Or perhaps you are a widow, who, like my own mother, sits alone at your table.
While the arrangements were still going on and the calls from friends were still coming in, the loneliness didn't fall on you so sharply. But now, when you come out to the kitchen in the morning there isn't anyone to speak to. Your life seems lived up against a high wall. You can't even shout over it.
How is the sting gone and the victory realized? Paul says it is "through Jesus Christ our Lord."
It is. If your grief is fresh, or if it is old, stop now and realize in detail that on every point, in all of your sorrow, Jesus Christ has identified with you. He was called "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Your grief is no strange thing to Him. "Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." Surely He is bearing yours now.
Are these pious platitudes? Suitable verses to use on sympathy cards? No. These are facts. But there are certain things which we must do before they become accessible to us.
First of all, we must spend enough time in learning what Jesus Christ is really like, so that we are willing to let go of our questioning. No one has a complete answer to the why of human suffering. Because He knows where He is moving with His creation, for reasons of His own, God permits both sin and suffering. It has been said that a scarlet thread runs throughout the pattern of the whole universe. "The lamb was slain before the foundation of the world." In one sense
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Calvary has always been. In every sense it will always be. And right here, as we face either the present reality or the future possibility of losing our loved ones in death, we must take hold of the fact that Christ Himself demonstrated on the Cross that nothing ever needs to be wasted if He is on the scene.
But as long as we block Him with our whys, we have not realized that as He hung on the Cross, He made provision for release from bitterness and anguish as well as release from the dominion of sin. Jesus Christ has already asked why for us! To you as women, I dare to plead that you will prepare yourself for what comes to us all eventually. For several years I have been urging acceptance of the human suffering from which none of us is immune. It will come to us all. To face this fact is not being morbid. It is merely being realistic. And unless you have sufficiently acquainted yourself with the true Nature of Jesus Christ before death slashes across your personal life, you can easily go down under its slashing. There is no other way to prepare for it. Jesus urged us to learn of Him. That is the secret. He will not wave a wand over you and dissipate your grief. But you will be permitted to enter into a new kind of intimacy with Him, when your loved one is gone. Somehow, we don't enter into this intimacy until we are forced to do it. But the door is always open for our entering. My mother, so recently widowed, urges me to tell you to stop every sudden swamp of grief with prayer. She wrote: "There have been evenings when I have gone to my knees three times as I made my way back to the bedroom alone! Always by the time I got there, I knew the Lord was with me."
We are given the victory "through our Lord Jesus Christ." He Himself, when His own heart was heavy with grief at the death of His beloved cousin and friend, John the Baptist, tried to get away alone. This is the human tendency.
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We long to shut ourselves up and treasure what we have lost. During our own suffering we must never forget that Jesus was human, too. "When Jesus heard of it (the death of John the Baptist), he departed thence by ship into a desert place apart: and when the people heard thereof, they followed him on foot out of the cities. And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick." Jesus longed to get away, to shut himself up and grieve for John. He understands your tendency to do the same thing. But "they followed Him." He was not permitted the luxury of people dragging the load of their own need. Did He demand His right to suffer in privacy? No. And here is the creative lesson for us in our times of sorrow. "Jesus went forth . . . " He knew of the need and He "went forth . . . and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick."
You are needed, too, somewhere, by someone. Perhaps by many. Jesus did not act as He did merely to give us something difficult to live up to. He acted as He did because He had created human nature and knew what would heal it! This brought not only healing to the multitudes who received His touch, it brought healing to His own grieving heart, too.
It won't take long to find those who need you. But you must stir yourself up and "go forth." You may not want to do it. Understandably you will want privacy. But the same life which moved Jesus of Nazareth will move you, if you are movable.
And always we must remember that our loved ones are not really dead. I was gloriously aware of this as I looked at my father in his coffin last summer. I saw only a bad photograph of his real living self! One way in which this fact of eternal living has been brought home to me is to realize
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that my essential self feels now at forty-two just the same as she did as a child. The essential self of our loved ones does not even lose consciousness. I read this once in an old book by Dwight L. Moody and I believe it with all my heart. Perhaps we are somewhat pagan to attend to the bodies of our loved ones whose essential selves have only been released so that they can really live.
The years may seem to stretch endlessly ahead for us. But once more, we must stir ourselves up to remember that God is dwelling along with our loved ones in an Eternal Now. And because we have received Eternal Life when we received Christ, we, too dwell in that same Eternal Now. It does not stretch out like a ribbon as time does. It surrounds us and dwells within us and we dwell within it.
A friend of mine asked an electronics expert to compute for her an average life span on earth, on the basis of the Bible's statement that a day is as a thousand years to the Lord. She wanted to know how long our lifetime really is to God, in relation to eternity. The answer came back: The average human life span is about one hour and fifteen minutes! I remarked to Mother one day not long ago that Dad must be restless for us to get there too, since he had always hated to wait. Mother smiled and said, "I suppose he realizes I only have about fifteen minutes more, and then I'll be there, too."
We can face our own deaths, too, "through our Lord Jesus Christ." There is no other way to face them. Once more, He has identified with us here. He died also. And then He came back to reassure us that it is all right, all the way there and back.
Life is going on for our loved ones and it will go on for us in an atmosphere of freedom which we cannot begin to comprehend in our mortal bodies. Jesus Christ took the victory away from the grave and gave it to us.
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The deep responsibility of being women is brought sharply into focus where death is concerned. Did Jesus have a deep, important motive in making His great statement about Eternal Life to Martha, a woman? I believe He did. After all, He, above anyone else in the world knew the tremendous power of a woman's life to mark other lives. And so, "Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
My mother's faith in this statement of Jesus is marking my life with joy and lightening my burden these days. She could be marking it another way.
You, just by being a woman, are marking lives, too. As I am. As are all women everywhere in the world.
Do we leave the gentle, creative marks of the Lord Jesus? Or do we leave the scars of our own self-centered lives?
If Christ lives in us, controlling our personalities, we will leave glorious marks on the lives we touch. Not because of our lovely characters, but because of His.
