In our culture, we do everything we can to avoid thinking about death—at least in a positive sense. We do, however, spend a lot of time thinking about how we can delay or avoid it. We pour our money and time into gym memberships, diet plans, and self-help books in hopes of staving off death, and maximizing our enjoyment in what we know we have—this life. Our Western world is starving itself of the life-giving implications of death.
There’s a Chinese cemetery across the street from where I work, and every now and then I’ll take my break and go walk through the grave stones. As I walk around, trying to make out what I can at each site, I’m forced to a place of contemplating death—and I think this is a practice we all need more regularly in our lives. Interestingly, if the Lord tarries, death is one of the few things every single one of us will experience personally at some point. Not everyone experiences the beauty of music, the warm love of a friend, or the joyful embrace of their parents, but everyone will experience death. For this reason, it seems like we should spend more time considering death and how its certainty impacts how we live our lives now.
Under Emphasized
In our culture, we do everything we can to avoid thinking about death—at least in a positive sense. We do, however, spend a lot of time thinking about how we can delay or avoid it. We pour our money and time into gym memberships, diet plans, and self-help books in hopes of staving off death, and maximizing our enjoyment in what we know we have—this life. Our Western world is starving itself of the life-giving implications of death.
Not many of our churches these days have graveyards at the entrance, or on the grounds. Nowadays we place our dead, like the topic in general, out of the way over there. However, like the practice of having ashes placed on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday marking the beginning of the Lenten season, passing by gravesites regularly on the way in and out of the worship service serves to remind us of not only our beginning (Gen. 2:7) but our end (Ecc. 3:20).
Ironically enough, it’s a sign of life to contemplate death in this way (Ecc. 7:2). Many would rather live it up now and use the party they create out of their life as a sedative numbing them to the certainty of what lies ahead in death. Conversely, it’s when we think about death, its implications, and our Creator-God that we begin to see our perspective on the life we live now may need to change in order to conform to what ultimate reality actually is. In this way, death leads to life.
