Windswept – April 2015
Posted on April 1, 2015 by Max Buchholz No comments
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Mortal Thoughts
Teach me to live, that I may dread the grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die, that so I may rise glorious at the awesome day. — Thomas Ken
When Katherine and I traveled home on our vacation last month we had a four hour layover in the Salt Lake City airport. That gave us plenty of time to walk laps in the C concourse and peruse the latest magazines and bestsel- ling paperbacks. On one of our laps I stopped long enough to purchase a special collector’s edition of the Scientific American.
The cover promised “Secrets of Staying Young.” Nothing I worry about, of course, but since I do serve in a church where other people are aging, I thought it might offer some useful information! (Yes, this is intended to be tongue-in-cheek; an older man keeps showing up in my bathroom mirror!)
The most interesting article in the collection of “secrets” was really a dis- cussion of how we deny the reality of death in our culture, and the value of facing death head-on. One study of patients coping with advanced stages of cancer found that people who have some kind of encounter with mortality tend to seek meaning in life, and those who pursue meaning (beyond just usual day-to-day concerns) can handle their mortality more easily. The au- thor summarized his findings by declaring “repeated contemplation of our eventual death could both lessen the anxiety about it and help keep us fo- cused on the aspects of life that matter most.”
Jesus-followers sometimes get (fairly) criticized for being “so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good.” We’ve denied the reality of our mortal- ity by talking and singing as if the life to come is the only one that really matters. But the focal point of our faith, we’re reminded again this Holy Week, is the Cross. God in Jesus Christ didn’t teach us how to avoid death, but demonstrated that the life that really is life is discovered through death—specifically His death for our sake. By loving us “to death” Jesus sets us free from our fears that our lives don’t matter. By rising from the dead Jesus shows us the death will not have the last word.