I never thought I would be standing over my father’s lifeless body. But there I was. It was two o’clock in the morning and my family surrounded my father’s bed. He had officially breathed his last breath and went home.
Some say that I was too young to see death. They thought it would scare me, or create some sort of mental problems down the road. They probably thought my mom was insane to wake her children up to see their father’s dead body. , I am glad my mother got us out of bed. I am glad she made us stare at him, showing us that he no longer had
Surprisingly, I am glad my mother got us out of bed. I am glad she made us stare at him, showing us that he no longer had life. I am glad she made us touch his cold, lifeless body.
In a recent article by Courtney Reissig of Christianity Today, she says:
As Christians, death should not scare us. The Bible does not shy away from depictions of death, most certainly not from depictions of the death of our Savior. Isaiah 53 reminds us that the death of our Savior was no more sanitized than the death of the lives lost that day at Sandy Hook. And if we turn our eyes away from his death, in favor of something more “clean,” we miss the point of it all.
That night taught me lessons that could never be learned by books, lectures or stories. Though there are probably many lessons I learned that night, the biggest lesson was that someday I will die. That might seem like a weird lesson, but here is why it is important.
When I looked at death, I imagined a time when I would be lying there, breathing my last breath. That reality changes your perspective on life. You realize that your hopes of immortality are no more real than a child’s thoughts of flying like Superman. And someday, I will leave this earth for world’s unknown.
It was at that moment that God was able to redirect my life. Dreams of fame, fortune, and future fell by the wayside leaving only two commandments to live by:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. Luke 10:27
I seek to do that until the day I die.
5 comments