I don't like thinking about death very often. It's not the brightest subject. But it's real and it's out there, whether I like it or not. One of our clients lost his wife very surprisingly and far too young the other day, and I can't help but ponder it. As a Christian, I believe that death is a veil that we pass through into something else. My belief in this is based on the fact that Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead. He's the only person in human history to do this, he predicted it, and the foundation of the church that I serve is rooted in this fact. The apostles went to very, very unpleasant deaths proclaiming this to be true, and if there was a body, the Romans could've produced it at any point to put an end to any resurrection nonsense. They didn't because they couldn't.
Therefore, death is truly a beginning -- like a newborn child, when we die, we pass through something immensely stressful, and we enter into a world completely unknown, where our senses are likely to encounter a world unlike the one we've known in our previous experience. Try explaining the world to a newborn that's spent 9 months in a warm, dark place, listening to its mother's heartbeat and digestive track as it moves food along the process. It simply wouldn't compute -- the outside world is too different. No wonder babies cry when they're born.
And yet, because it's so hard for us to contemplate, and because we can't wrap our heads around a completely different experience, we end up like Mary here in John 20:11 -- when we think about it, we find ourselves standing outside of death, weeping at the very thought of it. This world is so beautiful, and so many relationships are so rich, and the next step is so foreign, that we cannot help but weep out of sorrow for what we lose. Mary, who knew and saw far more than I did, wept at the reality of it.
Tim Keller says that the only thing death can do is make us better. I think about that a lot. It's an unshakable optimism and confidence in God's sovereign power over death. I pray for that. I hope for that. I don't know that I have it now. But maybe I'll grow into it.
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