Everyone is Dying These Days!
Yesterday my daughter announced to whomever she was talking to on the phone on her way out the door, “I don’t know…everyone’s dying these days!”
She went on to explain to whomever was on the phone that in November, her aunt, my sister’s childhood best friend, suddenly died of a heart attack as she was fighting a bad case of bronchitis. Christmas Eve, one of our cats was hit by a car out front of our house and died. Three days after Christmas, a 16-year-old friend of hers died due to complications from double pneumonia.
I sat in my office listening and quietly mentally adding to her list: there was a double homicide/suicide in October that left three children orphans, a friend from my youth group just lost her husband to kidney disease in January and a family at church just lost their mom unexpectedly yesterday morning. All in all, this is three people in their 30s, three in their 40s and a 16 year old. Most of us would agree that these are all unexpected ages to lose people in our lives.
“I don’t know… everyone’s dying these days!”
Her words echoed and I thought of all the widows and widowers in my life who thought they had more time, who thought they had their lives together mapped out. I thought about my friend, close to my age, who lost her husband over a year ago and months later lost her teenage son who took his own life.
My mind wandered as I considered whether or not to tell my daughter that the trip her dad and I were supposed to take for him to referee water polo in Pittsburg this Valentine’s weekend had been rerouted to our local hospital for an overnight stay with a cardiac stress test for chest pains he’s been experiencing. I didn’t want her to worry.
Fear is a POWERFUL… spirit.
I used to think of fear, anxiety, worry, concern etc as feelings that we feel, but anymore, I’m convinced that there is a spirit of fear behind it all.
2 Timothy 1:7 in the NKJV says, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
The longer I live the LESS ground I am willing to give to the spirit of fear because I KNOW that fear is NOT a gift I was given by God. Fear is a “gift” the enemy offers us and I imagine it to be nothing more than a flaming paper bag of dog poop on my front porch.
I have a friend who refers to satan as that ‘evil ol’ trickster,’ so when I begin to feel fear, anxiety, worry or excessive concern, I imagine that evil ol’ trickster setting that bag of dog poop on my front porch, lighting it on fire, ringing the doorbell and running.
In the past, when I would open the door, I’d imagine that bag setting my whole house on fire and burning it to the ground. I’d freak out, stomp all over the bag trying to put the fire out, smearing it all over the porch, getting it all over my shoes and making a much bigger mess than it started out as.
Now I open the door, roll my eyes and say, “Again? Didn’t work last time. Not going to work this time.” With a shrug of my shoulders and a resigned sigh, I grab a shovel, carefully picking up the flaming bag, dump it in a bucket of water I have prepared for such moments, and return to the house to wash my hands and get on with my day.
I haven't mastered the skill yet but I’m learning that I don’t even need to tell another living soul about the “gift” left on my front porch. Why would I? To verbally acknowledge that flaming bag of poo is just to let the one who left it know that he got my attention. I’m learning not to give him the satisfaction.
Did you know that fear can present itself and you don’t even have to react?
You can predetermine your response to fear so that when it shows up on your front porch, you know how you plan to handle it. When you pick up the flaming bag of dog poop with a shovel and dump it in a bucket of water, the only thing left to do is throw it in a trash bag and move on with your life.
If you sat down with me for five minutes and told me about your life, who you are, what you do for a living, if you’re married or not, if you have children, where you live, how much money you make, what kind of car you drive or what’s going on with your health, I could with great precision hone in on concerns you have and turn them into full blown anxiety, worry or fear. We as humans are experts at doing this and if you have ever told the wrong person your situation, you have probably experienced that moment where your slight concern almost turned to panic. Human nature.
The enemy is VERY well aware of our natural tendency to think the worst and since his influence is subtle, just an offered thought, it’s easy for us to miss the author and take the thought on as our own.
In the same way, if you sat down with me for five minutes and told about your life, who you are, what you do for a living, if you’re married or not, if you have children, where you live, how much money you make, what kind of car you drive or what’s going on with your health, I’m fairly certain I could find the incredible blessings in who you are and where you are in life. Without much effort, I could offer you thoughts about the goodness of God and cause you to reflect on the generous nature of His provision in your life.
So fear…
When you know at least a dozen women in your life who have become widows after their husbands experienced chest pain, it would be a very natural, human thought to consider the worst case scenario.
Fear suggested that I NOT tell my daughter where her dad and I would be spending the night. Fear offered about ten unique scenes to flash through my mind in less than ten minutes as I began packing a bag for the hospital. With each thought, I answered it. “Spirit of fear, I’m not interested in your suggestions,” then I named the individual suggestions out loud and corrected those suggestions with the truth of God’s Word.
I heard a pastor once say that after submitting yourself to God, (James 4:7) you can answer the spirit of anger, fear, rebellion, perversion, etc telling it to leave you alone and it must; however, unless you specifically answer the specific words he suggested, those words have the permission to hang around and accomplish what he put them out to accomplish. You must answer the words as well.
If he suggests you will struggle to provide for yourself in the face of loss, you can confidently answer him, “My God shall supply ALL of my needs according to the riches of His glory by Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:19)
If he suggests you will be alone for the rest of your life, you can confidently answer him, “God Himself has said that He will NEVER leave me nor forsake me, so I KNOW that I will NEVER be alone.” (Hebrews 13:5)
You get the point.
It is a VERY deliberate decision to TRUST God with your WHOLE heart when life circumstances shift in unexpected ways and the future begins to seem less certain.
My future is as certain as it’s ever been because God is already in it.
It is the LORD who goes before me and He will always be with me, will NEVER leave me and will not forsake me so I refuse to fear or be dismayed. (Deuteronomy 31:8)
He has made known the end from the beginning, what is still to come. He knows that His purposes will stand and He will do all that pleases Him. (Isaiah 46:9-10)
He goes before me and behind me and has His hand on Me. (Psalm 139:5)
Nothing can sneak up on me because God is my rear guard, He’s got my back. (Isaiah 52:12)
He was, He is, He is to come and He is Holy. (Revelations 4:8)
The number of my days were written in God’s book before I was even formed; (Psalm 139:16) which means that God also knows exactly how many days my husband and my children will have in this life. The day they go home to be with the LORD might come as a surprise to me, but God will not be surprised in the least.
This life is but a breath and my daughter is ABSOLUTELY correct, “Everyone IS dying these days.” Writing this blog, I’m 30 minutes closer to my death than I was when I began writing.
So what?
I don’t want to become cold or indifferent to death and dying but I refuse to give death and dying too much of my attention. It is a natural reality. It’s sad. When we lose someone, our life WILL look different than it did when they were in it, but God is not surprised or caught off guard.
They say there is a process for grief and the end stage is acceptance.
What if we accept grief premeditatively, before it even visits us?
What if, like that flaming bag of dog poop, we decide ahead of time that the end stage is acceptance and set our hearts in agreement with God that He is Sovereign and He has already carried our grief and sorrow?
What would that look like?
We would have to be a robot to feel nothing when fear or grief presents itself and psychology would probably argue that you were in denial or you had some sort of other mental condition if you experienced a significant loss and were unaffected by it. I’m not talking about being unaffected, I suppose I’m just taking a moment of quiet contemplation to agree with my daughter and the natural reality of this life, that everyone is in fact dying these days and setting my heart’s expectation that loss of any kind will NOT rob me of my peace or my joy.
I love my husband! We had many challenging years, mostly because of my own wrong thinking that led to years of “mental illness,” but I love him more today than I have ever loved him before. I cannot imagine my life without him. Everything that I’m terrible at, he is great at. He takes really good care of me and our girls mentally, emotionally, financially. He worries about things so we don’t have to. Perhaps that worry had something to do with his stress test, but he is a wonderful husband and father. He is an amazing nurse. He is a faithful friend. He is a good water polo referee and the world would have a BIG hole in it if he were gone.
He might outlive me and I’d leave a big hole in his world, or I might outlive him and he’d leave a big hole in mine. You should never have to bury a child, but the reality is that sometimes we do…We have.
Eventually….the end stage of that grief no matter who goes first is acceptance.
Job 1:20-22 “Then Job arose, tore his robe, and shaved his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped. And he said: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.’ In all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong.”
We could go round and round about life choices and consequences and God’s plans being for our good and the enemy’s involvement in bad things happening in our lives. John 10:10 says that the enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy and Jesus came that we would have abundant life, so I read this verse, “the LORD gave and the LORD has taken away” and my heart wants to wrestle a little. God doesn’t kill. He doesn’t take from us. He longs to give us an abundant life. My heart cries, “God gave, the ENEMY took away.”
In the book of Job, we notice that the enemy couldn’t just take anything he wanted, he did so with God’s permission. It was even at God’s suggestion. I feel like I’m headed in a whole different direction….Scripture says that God will TEST our faith, but He will never TEMPT us to sin. There is a huge difference and maybe someday the LORD will have me write about it but for now, the biggest truth of them all is that God is God and we are not.
We do NOT know all things. We CANNOT explain all things. It may never make sense why a toddler dies of cancer and a chain smoker lives to be 100, why a good mom loses her baby to stillbirth while drug addicts deliver crack addicted babies who live with the consequences of that for a lifetime. We are not God and I refuse to entertain the idea that I can figure it all out and explain it away.
In the end, let it be said of me that thoughts of fear were offered and I refused, that I refused to carry the grief Jesus already bore on the cross and that in everything, I did not sin or charge God with doing anything wrong.
We came from God.
We will return to God.
Blessed be the name of the LORD.