It is common wisdom that we humans suffer more in losing health and function, than we do in death. The slow decline of body and mind, once young, healthy and aggressive, trumps the ache of passing away.
I spent the weekend at a father-daughter retreat with my 10-year old daughter. It was a delightful time. The girls were full of giggles, playfulness, and inquisitiveness. They were energetic. At the end of Saturday the dads were tired and dragging, but the daughters still had their foot on the gas.
The whole experience contrasts with the lives many Fort Worth hospice patients are living. For those suffering from cancer, pain and fatigue are a minute-by-minute struggle. People with worn-out hearts or lungs battle air hunger all day.
But at one time, these people were little boys and girls, prodding their dads to take them to the archery range, and then canoeing. And they remember well what it was like. They hold to on it, and I think that is good.
It is good because the Creator promises newness. There will be a new heaven and new earth. We will receive a resurrected body. I have seen the sick and dying break into song when contemplating the newness that is to come.
There is a different kind of newness that doesn’t want to wait until we leave this land of the dying. It is the Spirit of having nothing to lose, releasing captives from the spirit of fear and slavery. It is wholeness now for those souls who are broken. It the entering into the exchanged life. Our lives for the One. Our ambitions for His. Our weakness for His power.
That doesn’t sound like an all-American “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of a life. It is more of a surrendering, or a giving away. Sound good? If this world is sucking what is best from you, it probably does.
Every last one of us will finally find enough lostness such that surrender sounds good. And when we do, when we throw down the fruit of the knowledge of the good and the evil (that desire to be, through our own power and by our self-determined moral terms, strong and perfect) such peace, victory and love in the community of fellow sufferers and our Father will be our own.
