Acoustic Death
If you’ve lost someone close to you recently, please stop reading this and come back for a different devotion. I don’t want to cause anyone heart ache but I do want to bring up a thought that has been going through my heart since Patrick mentioned a funeral for an auto accident in his sermon.
I once heard a speech where the speaker pointed out that we are all dying from the day we are born. This implies two factors. The first is that we are all going to die (unless the second coming of Christ occurs first) and the second is that as hard as we try, we cannot escape death. As much as we complain about the medical establishment, we devote a lot of resources to try to postpone that as long as possible.
I had my hair cut today and I was telling the guy cutting my hair about my 5-hour surgery I had a little over a month ago. He commented that he wondered what people did with a similar condition in history when they hadn’t developed the surgical techniques they have today. I pointed out 3 pieces of trivia.
The first piece of trivia was that during the revolutionary war days, there was no small pox immunization but they had developed a technique where they’d harvest some pus from a person infected with small pox and rub it in an open wound to come down with a hopefully milder form of the disease (I think the death rate plummeted from over 50% to around 20%). The second piece of trivia was the life expectancy at the turn of the twentieth century was about 49 years old. Sure some people lived to be 80 but as many died before 49 to make the average 49. The final piece of trivia was that antibiotics weren’t available until after World War II. This had a tremendous shift in the cause of death away from bacteria pathogens into things like heart disease and cancer. Causes of death that happen at older ages. While I fall under this more recent schema of medicine (barely) this implies that tremendous medicine development and discovery has happened in the last 60 - 70 years.
Patrick pointed out that the person involved in the fatal car accident probably did not think they would die that day. I can tell you for sure that the day my dad died of a heart attack driving home from work, I didn’t have a clue he was going to die. On the other hand, my mom was in intensive care for 5 days before she passed. While that didn’t make her passing any easier, at least I don’t remember the shutting down shock I felt when I found out my dad had passed.
I used to fear the eventuality of death in my younger years. In retrospect, I believe that a lot of the fear was the burden I would leave to my family should I pass on. As I have gotten older and more secure in my faith (and our son has his own family), I’m less concerned about the burden I’d leave to those left behind (my wife is a strong independent woman) and more, in some ways, looking forward to being in heaven with Christ for eternity.
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” - Revelation 21:3-4 ESV
“But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning— lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.” - Mark 13:32-37
Are you at a point in your faith walk where you don’t fear the eventuality of death anymore?
If not, what’s holding you back?
