by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith,
What have you learned as a Christian about death and dying? As an 84-year-old, how are you handling the fact that statistically your own death is not far off for you?
In the first place, death is real for everyone—Christians and all others. But death is also the most important deterrent to serious crime and abuse of others who are weaker than we. In fact, without death most of the morality we have could be lost. The fear of death keeps us from going too far since people could kill us. And with regard to the reign of God in human experience, death is like a beeper light at the end of every life reminding us all that we apparently have a limited time to consider God’s offer of a creative, loving and intimate relationship that starts in this life but extends beyond death. And because of this offer from God we can risk all or part of our lives loving and experiencing love that can transform all of life into fulfilling experiences of freedom from the irrational fears of rejection, injury and death.
I learned a number of things about death and dying between my eighteenth and twenty-ninth birthdays. During that time all of my family of origin either died or were killed. And I found myself planning funerals, picking out coffins and doing the paper work to clear up estates from age eighteen to twenty-eight. I had no idea how unusual that was. I just had to step up and do things because of the way things unfolded.
But I didn’t face the stark fact that I am going to die until the last member of our family—my mother, Mabel Olivia Davis Miller, died.
When she was sixty-three, she discovered she had terminal cancer and had only a few months to live. Since she was the youngest child of her family by fourteen years, her sisters and brothers had predeceased her, she was pretty much alone. When she had to be hospitalized, I asked the major company I worked for to transfer me to their Oklahoma City office (from Texas) so I could be with my mother who had been a sorority housemother in Norman twenty miles away.
I worked in the daytime and took the night nurse’s place for financial reasons. Because of that I got to sit with her while she was dying. And I was amazed. She was calm about her own death. She had me get a notebook so she could tell me what I would need to do as the last member of our family. She told me who to get for a funeral director—a friend of my father’s of whom I had never heard. Then she told me what to give to some cousins in Missouri whom I hadn’t known since I was a child. And she told me some people to notify when she died who would be hurt if they weren’t contacted—and she even helped me to pick out the clothes she’d be buried in—since I would have had no idea.
The bottom line was, here was a brilliant woman dying and in a good bit of pain who was thinking totally about other people. When everything was planned, a few days before her death, she said to me very calmly. “I wonder what death will be like. I wonder if there will be anything like consciousness and if Jesus was right when he said there will be a “place” for each of us—and if so, will we recognize those who have gone before.”
And I realized something I’ve never forgotten: that we learn how to face death by watching people do it with courage and trust.
But even with all that experience I never let my weight down into the stark fear and awareness that I am going to die—until after my mother’s death. After her funeral, I went into our family home in Tulsa and arranged for most of the things to be given to the Salvation Army. The last place I went to was the basement. There was a large room in the center and several smaller rooms with doors opening into the big room. When someone had died, what remained of their personal effects had been put in one of the separate rooms. No one wanted to go through them. But now there was no one else to go down those stairs to go through it all.
I remember sitting on the floor of that big room with boxes of family pictures and mementos of my dead family’s lives all around me. I felt helpless. I began to cry when I realized that there was no one left to tell me who the people and occasions in those pictures were. When I realized that I’d never know, I also realized that I’d just have to burn those last remaining evidences that these people had lived—people who had been so dear to my family and who had loved me. I felt lost and very sad.
That night I had a vivid dream. I was lying in a wooden box with my eyes closed. I sensed that someone was about to nail down the lid but I couldn’t get my eyes open or move my mouth as I realized I was being nailed in a coffin alive! I panicked!
Finally, with all my strength, I exploded my muscles and kicked at the top and woke up trying to scream “I’M ALIVE!”
The next morning as I sat on the basement floor in the midst of the boxes, I realized in a different way that I am going to die. And I thought about that. Then something occurred to me I’d never thought before and I said to God, “Whatever your plan about death is, if it’s good enough for them (and I indicated the boxes of pictures) it’s good enough for me.” And in that moment in the gray concrete basement I felt in some strange way that I had joined the human race. That was when I realized that death is like a red beacon at the end of the tunnel reminding us that if we want to live a good and loving life here on earth, we should get at it, since our time is limited.
Several months before my mother died I had committed as much of my life as I knew to as much of God as I knew in Jesus. However at that time I had not thought about my own death and how people who might see a picture of me might not know my name. And for me, those few minutes alone with the family’s past in that gray basement constituted one of the milestone steps in realizing that I had to begin to trust every part of my life to God in order to live in Reality.
Over the years I have been very healthy physically and I’m grateful about that. As a counselor I have also learned that everyone is afraid at some level—afraid of a few things or a lot of things. But I’ve also learned that Jesus left us an incredible Life Plan that is designed to free us from fear by teaching us to receive God’s love and acceptance and continual presence right now—without having to earn it. And realizing that I was loved by God somehow freed me to want to give other people who were lonely and afraid the same self-limiting love I felt from God and from other people I met the next few years who were attempting to surrender their whole lives to Him.
Since that time when I hear that someone I know has died, I realize that the best thing I can bring to their family is to be present during the time of the funeral. At first I didn’t want to see people who had lost a loved one because I didn’t know what to say. But then I remembered that Jesus didn’t promise to bring us brilliant or fancy gifts. He just promised to be with us—he promised us his presence. So now I can go and sit with a friend or family member without the burden of having something brilliant to say but just to listen to them tell what happened, how the sickness or death went, or whatever they want to say, if anything.
And over the years, I’ve learned that for me the acts of loving people, helping out if possible or just walking alongside them in simple ways by being present—all of these are parts of what Jesus promised each of us—as an aspect of loving us specifically. The bottom line is: we will never have to be alone again. He will be with us. And it is that love (not courage) that sometimes can cast out fear—even of death. (see John 4)
Regarding my own upcoming death, sometimes I wake up at night afraid. And when I do, I stop and surrender my whole life once more and thank Him for the remarkable years I’ve already had and for the people he’s put in my life to love. But mostly I’m filled with gratitude, and I’m more in love with my wife, Andrea, my grown kids and grandkids, great grandkids, old friends, and the crazy people I still meet with several times a week who continue to teach me how to live and love. So I’d like to hang around a while longer. I am very happy and love the work God has given me to do, as Andrea and I work together to finish a book about a new perspective that we have heard God offering in His story as we try to walk in it.
Lord, thank you that as we learn to love you and other people as you love us, you help us to trust our relationship with you and its continuance beyond pain and death—and the miracle is that we can begin to trust other people as you act toward us in trustworthy ways. Help us to surrender our lives right now—and then help us to look around and see who we might love and help for you today. Amen.
***
“You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live.” (Jn. 14:1-4, The Message)
“This image of planting a dead seed and raising a live plant is a mere sketch at best, but perhaps it will help in approaching the mystery of the resurrection body—but only if you keep in mind that when we’re raised, we’re raised for good, alive forever! The corpse that’s planted is no beauty, but when it’s raised, it’s glorious. Put in the ground weak, it comes up powerful. The seed sown is natural; the seed grown is supernatural—same seed, same body, but what a difference from when it goes down in physical mortality to when it is raised up in spiritual immortality!” (1 Cor. 15: 42-44, The Message)
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.” (1 John 4:17-18, The Message)
“You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. (Matt. 5:8, The Message)
“You don’t have to wait for the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all.” (John 11:25, The Message)
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith, I made a decision to give my life to Christ over ten years ago. It felt so freeing—to be able to trust God with the struggles in my life. But periodically I go through times of not being able to sleep, of going over my situation with a magnifying glass to see what I am doing wrong that is keeping my problems from clearing up. And as an only child and single mom, I worry what will happen to my boy and my girl if I should get killed or get sick and die! What happened to that freeing experience I had back at the beginning? Sometimes (I’m ashamed to say) I wonder if God is even real!
Your question brings up something I have experienced at several points in my life since I surrendered my life to Christ by a roadside in Texas. One occasion that comes to mind is a morning when I woke up restless and vaguely afraid…of what I wasn’t sure. Then I remembered: in the mail the day before I had received a letter from a good friend. He had just learned from his doctor that he had between two weeks and three months to live—a malignancy had reached his liver. I was deeply shaken and grieved. The vague anxieties I had felt earlier blossomed into concrete fears, and I began to imagine all kinds of bad things happening.
Over a year before I had decided to devote my time to writing professionally, without the support of a regular job. But I had been doing so much public speaking and traveling that I worried about not getting any writing done and not being able to make a living for my family. As the specters danced out of the shadowy corners into my conscious mind, I imagined my wife’s death and my great loneliness at her dying… the children had grown up and left home… I was a lonely old man. Then, like a jack-in-the-box, out jumped the specter of my own death, and I was afraid. I did not know in that instant whether I believed in Christ or even in God the Father. I experienced the great emptiness of death, was horrified… and desperately wanted proof and certainty.
But as I saw these things and faced the panic they brought, I also understood again with razor-sharp clarity the deep human meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ for me:
- “Let not your hearts be troubled…” (John 14:1)
- “I go to prepare a place for you…” (John 14:3)
- “…be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
I saw that I could not capture faith once and for all time and put it in a box for safekeeping. In the face of death and possible failure in my own life or in the lives of those I love, I could not even know for sure that “God is.”
“What am I going to do?” I thought, trying not to give in to the wave of desperation I felt was about to break over me. I had lived with faith for years, and it seemed to be crumbling all around me. Then I knew. All I could do to come to terms with my own death was to bet my life that Jesus Christ is “for real” and give Him my whole future.
I wish I could say that has been the only time in my life that I have gone through that cycle of doubt, panic, fear and re-commitment. But the cycle has occurred in various ways again and again, until it has become evident to me that this Christian Way is not often entered through the lofty door of philosophical reasoning, but through a wager, a bet with fantastic stakes. Because of what I have seen and heard in my own experience and in the lives of many others across the years, I have bet my life that God is, and that He is the kind of love that walked around in the life and actions of Jesus Christ. I have wagered that He even loves me and wants me to be related as a child to Him. And when out of great need, I have made this bet, I have stepped into a new dimension of life—life in which there is hope in history because God is at the end of the road for me and for all of us.
Now, although I still cannot know that God is real, I somehow do know. Even though I cannot prove it to you or even make the bet for you, I can say this: for me, these seem to be the only two alternatives—to live a worry-filled life of frantic hiding from myself and of psychological repression of thoughts about death and meaning, or to face death and life and make this strange gamble of faith that turns me outward toward other people and makes me want to be a loving person. I can see no other way for me than following Christ.
“We all want to be certain, we all want proof, but the kind of proof that we tend to want—scientifically or philosophically demonstrable proof that would silence all doubts once and for all—would not in the long run, I think, answer the fearful depths of our need at all. For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about Himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle that we are really after. And that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.” Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
Lord, I do love You. And I am very grateful that this relationship with You has been so often one of hope and a sense of expansion into a larger and more interesting journey. But occasionally there are these times of dread and doubt which bring me to my knees in awe. I see again that faith is a gift of grace, and that all the figuring and reasoning in the world cannot transport me across the void between us and You. Thank You that in Christ You have provided the leap of faith, the fantastic wager of life. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.” Psalm 34:4
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Over the years many serious, committed Christians have asked me questions about how to come to grips with such painful topics as sickness, handicaps, accidents leading to permanent injury or death, and other such matters. Devastated parents, husbands, young adults, when faced with the loss of someone on whom they depend, and whom they love deeply, begin to wonder what part God has in it all.
“Why was our child born with birth defects?”
“Why did my wife get cancer at 34 with four young children to raise?”
“Why was my father killed in a head-on collision by a drunk driver?”
“How could God let these things happen?”
These questions from the drawn, haunted faces of grieving, frustrated Christians keep coming back to me in the quiet of my study. Why indeed?
I have faced questions like these in my own life before and after trying to make a serious commitment of my life to Christ. I have cried, prayed, read, asked, and thought about the meaning of sickness and death.
When I was eighteen, I walked through the grief of a war telegram announcing the death of my only brother in a plane crash and saw what this did to my parent’s lives. I saw my mother have a nervous breakdown and then sat by her as she died of cancer in a few years. My father had ulcers and then a heart condition which combined to kill him when I was twenty-three. And in the midst of these sicknesses I broke my neck in a car wreck, and the doctor thought I might be paralyzed.
As each member of my family died I planned funerals and tried to console the ones who remained. As each one “disappeared,” I spent a lot of time as a young man thinking about sickness and death. I watched how they affected us all—the bad things and the good. And I remember looking up at the stars late the night we heard of my brother’s death and crying out, “Why?”
Since I have become a Christian I have seen that this scream is a way of asking probably the deepest and most perplexing question that faces a person who believes in the God of Jesus Christ: “If God is all powerful and also good, why does he allow evil and pain to plague his people?”
This was one of the first questions my mind went to after my conversion. Out of their uncertainty, people have come up with three basic notions about sickness—with dozens of variations. Some say, “Sickness is God’s will; therefore we must bear it patiently.” Others say, “Sickness is of Satan. And if we pray and have faith, God will root it out and heal us.” Still others believe that “out of sickness can come understanding, noble character and achievements which would never have been.” But having studied the Scriptures and having read many books on sickness and the whole problem of “undeserved” evil, I have not found any theoretical solution which satisfies the pain of the human soul in its agony and tells us “why.”
How then do we Christians face sickness when it strikes us or the people we love, or deal with the death of someone we love?
In God’s Good News—expressed in the drama of the life choices and experiences of a Person (not a reasoned theory about those choices and experiences), Jesus gives us something which is more valuable than intellectual answers to the deepest problems of human life. With his unique self-limiting love (he chose not to use his power to save himself or even to save his cause) he provides a paradoxical offer of freedom for all of us self-centered humans to transcend even our fear of death, to risk all of our lives in order to find the blessedness of God. Since our imaginations can absorb and be transformed by a love of us that does not demand a price in return, God gives us a choice of whether we want His gift of life in our experience that allows us to transcend and even utilize the circumstances that have us blocked. But to incorporate Jesus’ “answers” in our lives, we must move beyond the question of “why illness?” to “what can I learn from this illness?” and “How can I love others better in the midst of sickness and failure.
One person learns patience, understanding, and almost unimaginable compassion for others; another becomes an unbearable, complaining, hyper-sensitive and self-centered block to the healing power of love in the culture he or she inhabits. The choice can be ours. The question is, “will we choose to be wedded to Life and Love or to move into and be carriers of death’s darkness while still alive?”
But if the losses and tragedies of life can be valuable, then is sickness a good thing? The Gospels and the Church answer a resounding, “No!”
Here we have another of the many paradoxes of life and faith. Although disease, accidents and undeserved tragedies can bring great transformation of character, including the Christ-like qualities of compassion and the love of seemingly unlovable enemies to some, these horrible experiences of unexpected illness and early death can also destroy all a person’s values.
Christian physicians are right, I think, in giving their lives trying to snatch people from sickness and death, as Jesus did. For it certainly seems obvious that Jesus entirely rejected the idea that sickness was sent by God as a punishment. And as Louis Cassels (in The Real Jesus, page 26) points out, Jesus did not encourage the belief that the sufferer ought to remain ill in order to acquire courage or learn patience. In fact, the Gospels report nineteen specific instances, and allude to hundreds of others in which Jesus healed sick people by a word or gesture.
So Christ anticipated modern medical science by recognizing that all illness is to some degree psychosomatic—involving the mind as well as the body. And his conversations with the sick always show a concern for the mind and the spirit as well as the body.
But Jesus did not give those being healed, or his disciples, rational closure or a theory of sickness. He gave them a way to do what they could to help love those who were sick or lost. And today, by surrendering our lives to the Father and walking with those in pain we can be part of the love God offers to those at the end of their own ropes so that they can be open to experience God’s love and a way of life that can transform their sickness and even death into renewing life with the Father and his family.
God, forgive me when I blame you for allowing evil and pain, sickness and death, into our lives. Show me how to learn from suffering, and help me to let you show me a way through the suffering and pain, a way that leads me closer to you and toward becoming more like the loving person I now see that you always wanted me to become. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us.”
1 John 4:17
