At some point you realize that you have lived more than half of your life. I just turned 49 I see death differently than I did before. Although death, disease and accident does not discriminate by age, when you get to a certain age it seems that death is closing in. When you see your peers leaving the earth due to “natural causes” such as cancer, heart attacks and strokes it makes you think about your own mortality.

I have probably always had an unhealthy fixation with death. My elementary school was built next to a cemetery. Really. Who thought this was a good idea? I would walk along the fence line of the cemetery and read the names and dates on the tombstones. I would calculate how long they lived. Some would be larger numbers and others much smaller. I believe this was the first inkling I had of how precarious our situation was.

This fixation increased after watching a documentary about Nostradamus. This is not a documentary for a elementary student. The topic on nuclear war made me fear the sound of airplanes overhead for years.

On the drive from a funeral to the internment, I have often looked out of the window at the vehicles around me. In the wake of the death of a loved one, I would think, “Do these people know that the world has changed?”. For them it has not changed. The loss of my loved one did not appear as a blip on their radar. I imagine it like a drop in the ocean. That event..that death was a drop in the ocean. Near that drop, there were mighty ripples but as those ripples spread, the effect diminished. It is like an earthquake. Those nearest the epicenter are tossed about and are sure the world is ending, but those on the other side of the country don’t feel a thing.

It is true that a death in my family does not make news in Indonesia. It does make an impact in Heaven. In Heaven every tear cried is felt. For as much as we loved our mother or father or sister or brother or husband or wife, God loved them so much more.

What shall I say about all of these things? If these years on Earth were all there was, I would be without hope. Although there is a path that each of us must walk, unless Jesus comes back first, those who belive have a hope. In my flesh, I fear that moment when death will occur. It feels like the end of something. However, what I know is that it is only the begining. When we step through the door from this life, we are only going to the next one. The better one. A life free from things like cancer and heart attacks and strokes and natural disasters and war. This is only true if you if you have put your trust in the sacrifice of Jesus who came to Earth as a human to die to for all our sins and to give us freedom in this life and then eternal life with God.

If you died today, where would you spend eternity? Heaven will be my home, not because of anything, I’ve done, but because Christ did it all.

Be blessed