Before I thought about what I intend to write about I first had to think about an interesting fact. How many Bible characters got to go to Heaven without dying? I count only two. Enoch and Elijah. Everyone else had to die first. Even our Lord Jesus had to die before he could go back to where he came from. The only group of people who will skip death are those taken up in the Rapture.
My point in mentioning this is that even though death is universal and no one will escape it we all act like death and thinking about death and dying is to be avoided at all costs. We don't mind mentioning death in our witness. but we shy away from death personally when it involves us or those that we love.
I did not think about death even when Kathy was so sick. Death was still far off in the future. Until she died in her sleep and never woke up. She was sick but she was not terminally ill, just annoyingly ill.
I knew nothing about grieving and mourning until it hit me like a ton of bricks after Kathy died. Now it is a topic of great interest to me.
One thing that my experience has changed in me is that when someone is very sick and they have been prayed for and are not any better I do not pester God for their healing. I begin to ask the Lord that he would take them to their eternal home and that he would help them accept with dignity their situation. I pray that they would not lose their faith no matter what happens to them.
One final thought. Hope is vital to living. Even the terminally ill need hope. But the hope people who are dying have is simply the hope that their spouse or their children or anyone else in their life will be okay once they are gone. Hope has many facets and the hope of the dying is still hope up until they are dead. Love may be the greatest. But to a dying person hope is stronger than love.
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