Sitting in a chair next to her husband's bed, watching the man she has loved for decades slip away as she contemplates life without him. What she is sure of is that this isn't how she thought life would turn out. She pictured them growing old together but not going on without him.
Looking into her blank eyes that no longer recognize him as the man she married and raised a family with, he sees the bride he has loved all his adult life but she sees a stranger. He had imagined so many things as he had dreamed of their life together but he had not imagined this.
The young mother of three sits on the edge of her husband's hospital bed as he gasps for breath with the aide of pumped oxygen, barely alive and soon not to be. She had looked forward to so many things as they planned their lives together. This was not one of them.
I have long since lost count of the number of people I've been with in their final days and hours but I can tell you with certainty how many were surprised at how life turned out: All of them. Without exception, when I asked them if they had envisioned life turning out the way it had, they said, "No."
We dream of growing old together as in the words of the poet, "Come and grow old with me, the best is yet to come." But we don't dream of growing frail, losing our memories and losing our mates. We don't look down the road and see dementia or cancer or care taking for our bedridden mate.
We see time for coffee in the morning, long walks in the afternoon, cozy moments by the fireplace, bouncing grandchildren on our knees, traveling around the country, visiting old friends - golden years of a well-deserved retirement. But we rarely envision life at the end and it, therefore, never ends the way we thought it would as we do think about the end.
Yet, we know. We know that our heal will fail, that we will become elderly and frail, that we and our loved one will die one day, only not today, not yet, not now. But that day does come and it comes for us all for "it is appointed man once to die and then the judgment" (Heb 4:29).
What if we did look forward to that day and that "great gettin' up day in the morning?" What if we fully embraced the day of our death in Christ as we did our birth in him? What if we talked about the wonder and the glory of dying in the Lord as our greatest goal in life? What if we took the surprise out of the ending by keeping it in sight as the journey's end leading home?
What if death were a topic of discussion instead of a terror to be denied as we so often do when one expresses a sense of mortality: "Oh, don''t talk like that, you're going to be fine!" He's old and sick, and he will be fine as soon as the Lord takes him home, but he is not fine now. Death is as natural as life and it is the gateway to life eternal. Why let it be a surprise that unhinged your world? Why not let it be the icing on the cake of a life well lived? Jus' Ask'n.
No comments:
Post a Comment