death

For those who missed it, or those who would like to read it, here's the brief talk I gave at the EU Science & SciSoc "Making Sense of Death" event on 11/8/10. To God be the glory... definitely would have screwed it up without Him.

My dad died when I was 14. He’d had complications after a kidney transplant, and had been in hospital for two months as his body slowly shut down. I don’t remember whether I was looking at the heart rate monitor, or directly at him, when he died. But I was there, and he wasn’t anymore.

I will never forget the way I shook uncontrollably for five minutes afterwards. Nor will I ever forget the emptiness of our house when we went home. I can’t quite remember the hymns from his funeral, but sometimes in church I wonder “Was this one we sang?” and I choke up. A friend told me at the time that when his dad died, he felt five years older overnight, and I get that. Your life changes irrevocably when someone close to you dies. You get a hole right through you, a hole in your life and your experience. You always miss them, and you are never the same.

Death sucks. There is nothing good about it. When somebody close to you dies, every part of you screams that this is not right. You can’t make sense of it at the time, and by-and-large the passage of time just helps you move it to the background again. And yet it’s the only thing we can know for certain that we will experience. I have had depression and anxiety ever since my dad died. Depression is an all-pervasive pessimism, but it can bring to light a stark realism that you can’t ignore: you will die.

I am a Christian. I am by no means a good Christian, but I am a Christian nonetheless. And I am a Christian largely because Jesus beat death. When he walked the earth, he told his disciples that after being killed he would be resurrected, and he was. But Jesus’ resurrection is congruent with something I noticed after my dad’s death: that God can bring good things out of even the worst things.

My mum would comfort my sister and I with two Bible verses: Romans 8:28, which says “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose,” and Psalm 116:5, which says “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.” This last verse means that God watches over his people carefully, even in death, and that’s what I noticed. Dad had been an Anglican minister, but he lost his job a few years before his death. Because Dad wasn’t a minister anymore, we weren’t living in a rectory, and so we didn’t have to move when he suddenly died. You may call it a coincidence, but we were so thankful to God. Dad must have hated to leave us, but he left us in good hands.

God encouraged us through that time too. Dad’s funeral was at a large church building and it was still packed out - a witness to us of how many people’s lives had been blessed by Dad and his years of faithful service to God’s people. That kind of thing helps you see that though life will end in death, life doesn’t have to be futile. That’s why I can bear to talk to you about death, and why I’d encourage you to think about it once in a while. To think about the inevitability of death, about how you’re going to face it, and about what you’re going to do with your life in the meantime.

I am afraid of death. I think you’d be mad not to be. It’s not right, and it doesn’t make sense. But God can still bring good things out of it. Jesus beat death so He could give you life. His promise is that those who die following Him will be resurrected at the end of the world, and that they will live forever from that point on. Though I am scared of death, I am confident that God will bring me through it safely. Like Psalm 23 says, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for God is with me.