Written on September 21st.
Today is a day of lament for somebody. Maybe it’s us, or maybe it's someone else we know. Maybe those we love have been added to the numbers that change faster than we can breathe. There are websites where you can see how many deaths occurred today per second. The deaths are all numbers, and occasionally the news will put a face, a name, and a story to the numbers.
This week, another innocent black man was killed by police in Tulsa. Terence’s parents grieve the death of their compassionate son.
Meanwhile, the numbers on the databases change silently, faster than the tight, new heartbeats that spark in dark spaces.
And I sit with my friend in our living room, wondering whether the world is really ending, or whether we just feel like it is because death is all around us, closer than it’s ever been before. It's like it jumped off the TV screen and materialized in front of us.
Two of our classmates lost a parent this week. My uncle passed away last Friday. My friend’s relative passed away today. And tomorrow she remembers the eight-month anniversary since her mother’s passing. Death. Is. Everywhere.
And it makes no sense. There are scientific equations to rationalize the process of death—we all know the universe is constantly moving towards entropy and chaos, and like supernovas burning away, our cells are being oxidized slowly but steadily towards old age, and eventually decay.
And yet, death still makes no sense. There are moments so full of joy and enjoyment, those accomplishments that make us feel high, those relationships that satisfy us. Those moments are the ones that make us believe that life is truly a song worth singing. But death is a discordant, jarring note; no matter what you believe about science and the afterlife, it always will be.
It’s a sick joke to lose someone you love, to have your world stopped, while the rest of the world keeps going. You still have to go to work sometime. You still have to come back to school and do that homework and study for those exams. You still have to give your kids cereal in the morning. Time doesn’t stop to let you grieve. You wake up the next morning and you are still responsible for your actions. You are paralyzed, and yet you still have to keep moving like life is a treadmill.
To paraphrase the words of one of the ancients: If we humans have hope in this life only, we are, out of all species, most to be pitied.
I don’t know what you might believe about life, death, or faith.
Some people are content in believing that slow combustion is all there is.
But I’m not content with that. And I think most humans aren’t, either. We are too passionate for that. We grieve, we anger, we love, we feel too much.
We’re always searching for meaning everywhere—what other species looks at tea leaves and sees an omen, gazes at the stars and craves direction?
I found meaning in something crazier than tea leaves and constellations.
An exiled man on a rocky island two thousand years ago received a vision, a dream, of what a human future full of flourishing might look like. He saw the heaven and earth we know, renewed. The same, and yet also different. And the God who was in the vision was the same he had known before, but different, too:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! The dwelling place of God is with people. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more,neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, because the former things have passed away. Look, I am making all things new.”
Of course, the ancient book is the Bible, and the writer was one of Jesus’ apostles.
But this passage doesn’t say "religion" to me. It doesn’t tell me about predestination or salvation or all the other words we’ve gotten our panties in a twist about at the myriad institutional denominations that have formed to divide the body of Jesus followers.
There’s a longing in this passage, an ache that it might be too good to be true, that pulls at my gut and doesn’t let go. The kind of hope offered here isn’t ethereal and angelic. It’s not that we’re going to be in white night robes with harps in our hands.
The kind of hope I see is deep and guttural. It’s the healing of the forests in Colorado that look like tattered rags, shot through by fungi, by diseases caused by the mining industry of times past. It’s the drought in California and the violence and corruption in my Mexico. It’s the hope that my friend gets to hug her mom again, and that I’ll see my loved ones free of disease, thriving. It’s the hope that our hearts and our systems will stop being racist, that we won’t sell our girls into sex trafficking, that women will stop being trampled by men, that boys will be taught how to healthily process emotions. It's the hope that my grandmothers will be reunited with the men they loved and lost way too soon.
This hope exists. And we don’t have to wait until death or the afterlife to live out this hope. God has given us a way, through a man named Jesus, to know what hope and abundant life look like now.
I know people comfort each other all the time by saying that death is a part of life. Maybe it’s part of biology, but even then, it’s not part of life. Life is good, vibrant, abundant. Death is painful and wrong. The longing I have for the kind of world the Bible describes tells me that death isn’t normal. One day Death and all His friends—Mourning, Crying, Pain—will cease to be.
Life can be so beautiful. But it’s very broken. The world has seen its share of grief—mass extinctions, holocausts—and we only share in such a tiny fraction of the pain.
To know that there is hope of comfort and healing for all the pain that ever was and ever will be shows us that we are far more loved than we never dared to believe.
And in the end, the only fruitful response to this sore wound of pain the world wakes up to every day is to love the people around us to the best of our ability. We can't control whom we lose or when, but we can ask God for the strength to love the people standing in front of us while we still can.
