Because we believe it is our due, we’re confident that even the darkest clouds have silver linings. When someone dies in old age, we rejoice that he had a long, full life. On the other hand, when someone goes suddenly, we’re comforted knowing he did not suffer long. When someone dies young but not so suddenly, we’re glad he had the opportunity to say goodbye. We find reasons to give thanks not only in death but in dying.
When we are merely terminal but not yet terminated, we are blessed. We can live each day as if it were our last. Sometimes the doctors seem to give us enough of a glimpse of the future — you have weeks, you have months — that we think it changes everything.
We are all terminal. Every mother’s son of us. The future, or rather our knowledge of it, however, isn’t binary. We neither know for certain what is to come nor are we utterly ignorant. Some things we know; some things we don’t. Most things we know only vaguely.
We know we are going to die, but we don’t know when. We know that others we love are going to die, but we don’t know when. Neither do we usually know how. What we do know, however, is exactly what we need to know. We are called to know this: knowing more details about our future should not radically change our present.
“What would you do if you knew you had only a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour to live?” may make for an interesting parlor game. We ought, however, to answer “The same thing I have been doing, hoping that I have decades left to live.”
On the one hand, we ought not live casually, walking through lackadaisical days on the brash assumption that we have plenty of time in front of us. On the other hand, though, we don’t want to toss aside the wisdom of a calm, faithful, steady life on the grounds that it could all end tomorrow. If I were to die tomorrow, I only hope that I will have been faithful today.
Our calling, in short, is not grounded ultimately in our peculiar circumstances. We don’t have one set of obligations when we are healthy and looking forward to many more years and a different set when we are beset with illness and already feel the icy breath of death on the backs of our necks.
When we marry we vow to remain faithful in sickness and in health. Circumstances do not change that calling. The same is true of each of us as we together constitute the bride of Christ. He calls us to love, honor, and obey Him in every and all circumstances. His pledged love to us is not that we would avoid suffering and death but that He would remain faithful. We, in turn, are called to be faithful to Him, to seek first and always, in plenty and in want, in sickness and in health, His kingdom and His righteousness.
Because He assures of this— that He is faithful—and we are called to be the same, we are able to do what we are called to do: to trust in Him. He is the perfect husband, and all that He sovereignly brings into our lives He brings for our good and His glory. He gifts us, as His bride, not with diamonds and pearls but with that which is far more valuable— the very fruit of the Spirit.
His promise is that He is making us more like Him, and we could wish for nothing greater. Because we know where we are going—that we will be like Him, that He will and does hold us, laugh with us, and dance with us—we can be at peace in all things. We can profess with deepest joy: “The Lord giveth. The Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
