Death

Cautious... Careful... One step. Two steps. Closer. Lowering. Dip into the water for that long cool drink. Watch! Stop and listen! Everything is fine. Lower again. Eyes closed. Rest for a second. Feel the coolness flow down. Snap! Eye's wild. Panic. Pain. Get away! Held tight. Trapped. Frantically struggling. Can't get away! Teeth. Tearing teeth. Ripping flesh. Dripping blood. Fight! Weakness. Rolling. Rolling. Can't get away! Slower now. Can't feel. Pain. Darkness. Darker and darker. Limp. Death.

Where is God in this? Where?! Can a "God of love" possibly have a hand in this? We've all seen this scene on some national geographic show. The cute little antelope comes down to drink and is snapped up by the lurking crocodile. Does this scene prove the evilness of creation; that the curse of man is alive and well and rampant throughout?



Do we serve such a small God as to say that he cannot preside over death? He is the author of life! Just as a writer can erase what he has written, so cannot God take life away from those he has given it to? Of course he can. It seems to me that we have a view of life as an ultimate good and that this physical death is the ultimate evil. So what is death? That would be a good place to start.

Physical death is the absence of life. And either/or situation. If it was once alive, and is no longer, then it's dead. It cannot reproduce, it is not sustaining itself, there is no electrical or bio-mechanical or bio-chemical functions happening. I think these must be taken as a whole, for there are always exceptions to certain conditions, i.e. suspended animation or sterile mules. It is interesting to me how the basic unit of life is a cell, and we can describe in great detail the workings and reactions that happen with it, and we can take all these cells and describe how they work in relation to each other, their reactions to various stimuli, and yet there is still that spark of life that is undefinable. We can gather all the necessary ingredients and put them all together but still not have that thing we call life. This mystery is what makes it so valuable.

And yet we see in nature this terrible law of survival, a "kill to live" mentality, where organisms live and die in a continuous cycle. Some people have come to worship this very cycle, but to do so takes away the very beauty of life itself, the individual is lost in the swirling mass of consciousness. But there IS beauty in this cycle. I believe that many Christians have missed it by throwing out the cycle altogether by insisting that natural death is evil. By claiming that all death is evil, Christians lose much of the beauty of nature, of the eagle swooping down to snatch the trout, of the powerful lion chasing down his prey, of the interesting venus fly trap clutching it's insect. There is a terribleness in it all, but it is awesome. There is a finality about it all, and yet there is renewal. There is a mysticism about it, and yet it permeates every aspect of our daily lives. Let us then worship a God who is terrible and beautiful, who is love and who is holy, who gives life, but also takes it, who is over and above all things and yet loves individually. Let us worship God in THOSE terms.