Death of a Loved One: Confronting Death

Every day we thank God for our relational richness with each other, with our children, grandchildren, friends, and ministry partners! None of our relationships is perfect. In a fallen, sinful, and selfish world, there are no perfect relationships. But they are still our highest calling, our top priority, and our greatest joy in life!

Through the Spirit and Word, we have sought to be deeply rooted in the love of the Lord Jesus. We have also sought to be deeply rooted through love in our relationships. Short-term, casual, and superficial relationships are never fulfilling or fruitful. So we have sought to go for depth before breadth in our relationships. God has graciously honored this beyond our wildest dreams! As a result of investing our lives in these wonderful people God has sovereignly connected us with, we are seeing both depth and breadth of impact for the Kingdom of God “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).

It is because of these wonderful Kingdom-building relationships that retirement is not in my vocabulary and not on my radar screen! The words relationship and retirement are mutually exclusive concepts. We do not retire from relationships in marriage or ministry— at least, we were never supposed to. God doesn’t retire from His relationship with us. Neither can we retire from our relationships with others. I could not imagine retiring from my marriage with Patt or my relationships with my children, grandchildren, friends, or ministry partners.

At this stage in life, even if we may retire from a “nine-to-five” job, we need to refire and redeploy! And through the good, bad, and ugly, we are to hang in there and keep trying to deepen and enrich relationships as long as God gives us life.

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Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many. Hebrews 9:27–28

One of man’s oldest and most desperate questions is that asked by Job: “If someone dies, will they live again?” (Job 14:14). It is interesting to see in this age-old question our own reticence to speak of death. We also fear thinking about death or talking about it, either in general or about our own death in particular. Perhaps our reasoning is, if we think or talk about it, we will invite it prematurely upon ourselves. So, it’s best to not go there.

Man fears death for many reasons. It is the great unknown, the “far country” from which no traveler has yet returned (discounting, of course, the resurrection of Christ). We fear that it will permanently destroy cherished human relationships. Man was created by God for relationships, and the quality of those relationships determines the quality of one’s life. Therefore, man fears that death will forever bring an end to those precious relationships.

We also fear death because we believe that it might forever bring an end to meaningful activity. Man was created for activity, productivity, and to achieve meaningful goals in life. As Solomon observed, “I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work” (Ecclesiastes 3:22). So we fear that death will bring an end to meaningful labor and we’ll be reduced to a state of non-existence or inactivity.

The greatest certainty of life is death. Death is the ultimate statistic of life. Unless we live until the rapture, none of us get out of this life alive. That’s why the Bible, history, contemporary events, and personal experiences regularly remind us of the absolute certainty of our mortality.

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