I realize that talking about death, like talking about sex, is not the easiest for most parents. That’s ok. Both have a huge impact on our lives and we are right to be reverently cautious when we speak of powerful and intimate things. But that doesn’t mean we should refrain from speaking about them openly and often.

Like most people, I (Alasdair) was no stranger to the fear of death as a child. I don’t doubt that I will feel it keenly again if the Lord chooses to let me see my last day approaching. But I was enormously helped as a kid in my battle against the fear of death by a very simple, vivid, and comforting truth my mother used to repeat to me. Indeed, it still comes to my mind, even now, when death rumbles by closer than normal.

The truth that helped me, of course, is that God holds us in his hands. He numbers our days. Not a hair can fall from our heads without his say so. He is in control, sovereign, and omnipotent. But it was the way she said it that stuck with me:

If it is the time God has chosen for you to die, you can drown in a thimble; if it’s not, then you can survive for days in the open ocean.

Now I’m not sure exactly how I knew what a thimble was. Maybe I’d started playing Monopoly. Maybe my mom had explained how a thimble is used in sewing when it came up in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. (I certainly never advanced to the point of being able to use a thimble in sewing!) I can’t recall. But I do remember genuinely understanding what she was trying to tell me.

The bottom line is that kids think about death; kids are afraid of death; and there’s nothing like a global pandemic closing their schools and churches, to make them start thinking more about it. This, then, is a perfect time to raise the subject with them.

I realize that talking about death, like talking about sex, is not the easiest for most parents. That’s ok. Both have a huge impact on our lives and we are right to be reverently cautious when we speak of powerful and intimate things. But that doesn’t mean we should refrain from speaking about them openly and often.

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