Getting Older

My mom had a heart attack last week--a couple weeks after her 80th birthday.  The doctors told her all her major arteries were completely blocked.  They are shocked she's still alive. Open heart surgery looms later this week, provided her lungs are healthy enough to handle the surgery (years of smoking hasn't helped the situation).

Getting older, getting sick, facing our mortality...it's such a drag.  We were made for life and when death comes knocking on our door--or at least waves from a distance--it feels like such an interruption.

That's because it is.  Death is the unwanted, unwelcome intruder to  life.  But it's here.  It is coming...for all of us.  Sooner or later, today or tomorrow or fifty years from now, death is coming.  It doesn't matter how many vitamins we take or how many plastic surgeries we have to try to retain that youthful look.  Death is coming.  Deal with it.

But most don't.  Most of us stick our head in the sand.  Or we buy into the idea that "good people" go to heaven, and since we all consider ourselves good (or at least better than average), we assume we will be okay.  Meanwhile, we wonder..."How good am I, really?  And who determines how good you have to be?" (see Andy Stanley's excellent little book, "How Good is Good Enough?")

But when you get to where my mom is--with the imminent threat of death--all of our wishful thinking goes out the window.  We want answers.  We want truth.  And most of all we want assurance.  

Jesus said, "Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he/she live."  

Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life (huge, huge, HUGE claims).  No one comes to the Father except through me."  They killed Jesus for saying things like this.

The apostle John wrote, "God has given us eternal life (note that eternal life is a gift--not something we earn or deserve--see Ephesians 2:8-9), and this life is in his son (Jesus).  So whoever has God's Son has life; whoever does not have his Son does not have life...I have written these things so that you may know (i.e. be assured) that you have eternal life."  They banished John to a prison island for writing such things.

When you get right down to the end of life people who know and love Jesus--and I mean that at the deepest, most intimate level--face their death with an amazing peace and even a sense of anticipation.  

I hope that is true for you.  If you've not wrestled with those big issues before--as in your own mortality and appointment with death--what are you waiting for?