how then do we understand death?

Below is an excerpt from Dallas Willard’s writing in the "The Divine Conspiracy," a chapter entitled "What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World." This whole chapter (the whole book, really) paints such a clear, concise and beautiful picture of what our life with God is supposed to look like. What it was designed to look like. But this excerpt especially, from the third chapter, spoke directly to my heart about grief. It illustrates the picture of death we so often fear, explains how God sees physical death, and provides hope as we envision, grapple with, and seek to understand the death of a loved one. My prayer is that it blesses you as much as it blessed me to read it today.
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          "In 'A Confession,' Leo Tolstoy relates how the drive towards goodness that moved him as a boy was erased by this experiences in society. Later in life, after overwhelming success as a writer, he nevertheless sank into psychological paralysis brought on by his vision of the futility of everything. The awareness that the passage of time alone would bring everything he loved and valued to nothing left him completely hopeless. For years he lived in this condition, until he finally came to faith in a world of God where all that is good is preserved…
          Jesus…brings us into a world without fear… He lived, and invites us to live, in an undying world where it is safe to do and be good. He was understood by his first friends to have ‘abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel’ (2 Tim. 1:10). Thus our posture of confident reliance upon him in all we do allows us to make our life undying, of eternal worth, integrated into the external vistas and movements of the Spirit…
          Once we have grasped our situation in God’s full world, the startling disregard Jesus and the New Testament writers has for "physical death" suddenly makes sense. Paul bluntly states, as we have just seen, that Jesus abolished death – simply did away with it. Nothing like what is usually understood as death will happen to those who have entered his life.
          To one group of his day, we believed that "physical death" was the cessation of the individual’s existence, Jesus said, "God is not the God of the dead but of the living" (Luke 20:38). His meaning was that those who love and are loved by God are not allowed to cease to exist, because they are God’s treasures. He delights in them and intends to hold onto them. He has even prepared for them an individualized eternal work in his vast universe.
          At this present time the eternally creative Christ is preparing places for his human sisters and brothers to join him. Some are already there – no doubt busy with him in his great works. We can hardly think that they are mere watchers. On the day he died, he covenanted with another man being killed along with him to meet that very day in a place he called Paradise. This term carries the suggestion of a lovely gardenlike area.
          Too many are tempted to dismiss what Jesus says as just ‘pretty words.’ But those who think it is unrealistic or impossible are more short on imagination than long on logic. They should have a close look at the universe God has already brought into being before they decide he could not arrange for the future life of which the Bible speaks.
          Anyone who realized that reality is God’s, and has seen a little bit of what God has already done, will understand that such a ‘Paradise’ would be no problem at all. And there God will preserve every one of his treasured friends in the wholeness of their personal existence precisely because he treasures them in that form. Could he enjoy their fellowship, could they serve him, if they were ‘dead’?...
         The words of Vladimir Nabokov…express[es] the reality of God’s world and its closeness to us. In a letter to his mother to console her on the death of his father, he wrote,

Three years have gone – and every trifle relating to father is still as alive as ever inside me. I am so certain, my love, that we will see him again, in an unexpected but completely natural heaven, in a realm where all is radiance and delight. He will come towards us in our shared bright eternity, slightly raising his shoulders as he used to do, and we will kiss the birthmark on his hand without surprise. You must live in expectation of that tender hour, my love, and never give in to the temptation of despair. Everything will return…         Jesus made a special point of saying that those who rely on him and have received the kind of life that flows in him and in God will never experience death. Such persons, he said, will never see death, never taste death (John 8:51-52). On another occasion he says simply that ‘everyone living and believing in me shall never die’ (11:26).
          So as we think of our life and make plans for it, we should not be anticipating going through some terrible event called ‘death,’ to be avoided at all costs even though it can’t be avoided. That is the usual attitude for human beings, no doubt. But, immersed in Christ in action, we may be sure that our life – yes, that familiar one we are each so well acquainted with – will never stop. We should be anticipating what we will be doing three hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years from now in this marvelous universe…
          Of course something is going to happen. We will leave our present body at a certain point, and our going and what we leave behind will not seem pleasant to those who care for us. But we are at the point as Paul also says, simply ‘absent from the body and present with the Lord’ (2 Cor. 5:8).
          Early Christians spoke of their condition at physical death as being ‘asleep’… But there is no intention in this language to say we will be unconscious. Consciousness continues while we are asleep, and likewise when we ‘sleep in Jesus’ (1Thess. 4:14; Acts 7:60). The difference is simply a matter of what we are conscious of. In fact, at ‘physical’ death we become conscious and enjoy a richness of experience we have never known before.
          The American evangelist Dwight Moody remarked toward the end of his life, ‘One day soon you will hear that I am dead. DO not believe it. I will then be alive as never before.’ When the two guards came to take Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the gallows, he briefly took a friend aside to say, ‘This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.’
          How then are we to think about the transition? Failure to have a way of thinking about it is one of the things that continues to make it dreadful even to those who have every confidence in Jesus. The unimaginable is naturally frightening to us. But there are two pictures that I believe to be accurate as well as helpful. They can help us know what to expect as we leave ‘our tent,’ our body (2 Cor. 5:1-6).
           One was made famous by Peter Marshall some years ago. It is the picture of a child playing in the evening among her toys. Gradually she grows weary and lays her head down for a moment of rest, lazily continuing to play. The next thing she experiences or ‘tastes’ is the morning light of a new day flooding the bed and the room where her mother or father took her. Interestingly, we never remember falling asleep. We do not ‘see’ it, ‘taste’ it.
          Another picture is of one who walks to a doorway between rooms. While still interacting with those in the room she is leaving, she begins to see and converse with people in the room beyond, who may be totally concealed from those left behind. Before the widespread use of heavy sedation, it was quite common for those keeping watch to observe something like this. The one making the transition often begins to speak to those who have gone before. They come to meet us while we are still in touch with those left behind. The curtains part for us briefly before we go through.
          Speaking of the magnificence of this passage into the full world of ‘the heavens reopened,’ John Henry Newman remarks, ‘Those wonderful things of the new world are even now as they shall be then. They are immortal and eternal; and the souls who shall then be made conscious of them will see them in their calmness and their majesty where they have ever been… The life then begun, we know, will last forever; yet surely if memory be to us then what it is now, that will be a day much to be observed unto the Lord through all the ages of eternity.’ It will be our birthday into God’s full world." 

seasons of change

Last year I was told/warned, repeatedly, that the second year of loss is often harder than the first year for most people.  It was not something I had wanted to hear last year because when your “good” days do not really feel all that great, you do not particularly want to think about a year from now possibly feeling even worse – where is the hope in that?!  I consciously chose to ignore that advice because last year I desperately needed hope.  I decided my grief journey is going to be just as unique as I am and I will not let “statistics” guide how I feel or heal or approach life.  I certainly was not going to let it be a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Now that I am several months into the second year following Ryan’s death, I am allowing myself to look backward and I can understand why people give that warning about the second year.  I am not sure I agree with it, but I understand it.  Part of it is that you are so insulated during that first year that the second year leaves a lot of the wounds wide open to feel more deeply.  A little perspective, and a year of living without your beloved, makes your reality more real. 

Last week was the first day of fall and as I placed a little pumpkin out on my porch, I remembered a post from a year ago during this same time of year (September 2016 post link) and I began to reflect over the emotions of this past year.  Placing a pumpkin on my porch last year was a symbol of pain – the kids and I had just moved into our new home that last week of summer (we have now been in this house over a year now - wow!).  Last September we were beginning to build a life moving forward – not because we wanted to, but simply because we had to.  Fall was a beginning and it was the first new season that Ryan was not a part of.  He had died just days into the summer of 2016, but was not ever a part of that autumn season.  I have mentioned how those first few months after Ryan's death were a blur to me, I really do not remember most of last summer at all except random, unconnected snapshot memories.  I think when we are in more pain than we can bear, God protects us with shock and numbness.  It is like a bubble of grace holding us up to help us get through the toughest of times.  We cannot remain in shock or live in that bubble forever, because we are not really living, but it can be a way to carry us forward until we can begin to find our footing and take steps again.

In hindsight, last year’s fall was tougher than the summer because I do not remember the summer very well.  I was protected and cared for all last summer – both by God’s bubble of grace and by all the family and friends stepping in to do the things I could not do.  Fall brought having to step out on my own and start to do things for myself again.  It meant those precious others that held us up had to slowly return to their normal lives again.  It meant acknowledging my pain, sitting in the loneliness, working through it all, and taking care of my children as a single parent.  Autumn is also a transition into the season of holidays, which are supposed to be times of joy and family togetherness.  How do you move into a season that celebrates all that goodness when you feel your joy is gone and your family is broken?  But somehow, step by step, with God's abundant grace and comfort, I made it through each difficult day of last fall.

Winter and the new year brought a step out into making new friendships and connections with other homeschool mamas and by spring I was really feeling like I could be okay.  I mean I survived the holidays and I even found joy in them somehow.  God is so good.  I felt stronger and I knew God was walking with me.  So much so that I actually felt happy and alive again.  I was able to attempt new friendships and I was finding myself, a very different me than I was before, but a more compassionate, more sensitive, and hopefully more reliant-on-God me.  It felt good.  It felt hopeful.

Several months later, just before the coming of summer, I met someone.  I have been hesitant to type those words, for fear that I would be judged, mostly by my own self...  Did she just say she met someone?  A boyfriend?  Do homeschool mothers actually date?  Is it too soon?  It’s only been a year, right?  Does she love Ryan?  What about the kids?  etc…  And my other fear is that it would not last and my heart would not be able to handle another break. 

To answer those questions, yes, someone showed up who wanted to get to know me and I had a "boyfriend" (and I still cringe at those words because they still feel so weird and uncomfortable for me to say after 15 years of marriage).  Yes, homeschool mothers can "date" - I am still trying to convince myself that I can use that word, although my grief therapist says that "single mothers do date and that is completely normal."  Too soon?  I don't know that there is ever any set timetable for that - I met someone who was sweet and caring and compassionate and made me laugh.  He was my best friend all summer and I began to feel safe sharing the pieces of my life – my sorrow, my joy, my confusion, my excitement - again.  I had someone who wanted to cheer me up on a bad day and someone who wanted to share their day with me.  I do not think there is ever a bad time for that kind of relationship in anyone's life.  And Ryan, oh, I completely love, and always will love, my Ryan, that could not ever change.  But my heart, after being busted open in grief, has room for lots more love.  And this new addition to my life was so sweet and good with my children, another fear that God eased as my children let him be a friend.  And then my final fear, will it last or will my heart break?  Ultimately the latter of the two.  After several months we decided to go our separate ways and it was a mutual decision.  But regardless of how the decision was made, it was a difficult one for both of us and a painful one - losing a best friend always is.  I have peace though that my actions were taken prayerfully and that I am exactly where I am supposed to be right now - God's timing is always perfect.

But here I am entering into fall again and I am in pain.  And, again, I barely remember the details of the summer preceding it, but this time that is because it was a joyful summer - a blending together of beach days, swimming, carefree children, time with friends, lots of travels (from DC to San Diego to Yosemite), and learning to love again.  I was truly learning that my heart could love again.  Even if my heart got a little bruised in the process, I felt what it feels like to have a hopeful joy shared with someone else and it gave me hope.  Maybe I needed that season of pure joy, a break from the hard work of grief, to see a new and fresh glimpse of hope. 

I just find the parallels in seasons ironic and painfully beautiful and kind of poetic – each summer has been a blurry melting together of unconnected events, one from shock and the other from joy, and each one followed by the coming of fall, bringing a cold dose of reality that I do not want to face.  God created autumn to be a time of stripping away the things from the previous year so that after a season of winter, new life can spring forth again. That is how my heart feels again this autumn.  I feel God stripping away the things I wanted to cling to in order to let Him sustain me through the winter, with the hope of bringing forth new life with the coming of spring.  Here in California that metaphor does not really hold up well (it was a sunny 80 degrees here today), but having lived in places where the winter is harsh, I can remember the autumn trees losing all their leaves (and joyful children jumping in big piles of them for that satisfyingly lovely crunch sound!), followed by the frosty winter in which we snuggle together with our loved ones and celebrate the birth of our Savior.  And then the JOY of spring flower bulbs popping up and cherry blossoms opening and the whole world coming to life again.

So, yes, this second year is hard.   Is it harder than the first?  I do not think anything is harder than hearing the news that your beloved is dead.  But beyond that, in a lot of ways, yes, this second year is much more challenging.  Partly because most of those around me have returned to their lives while I still grieve - and in fact I have returned to my new normal life while I still grieve.  I have had to learn that I will always still grieve while carrying on and moving forward.  That emotion continues on the inside and always will, and that can just be inwardly exhausting at times.  And going forward this year is so difficult because each little bump and bruise I experience hurts a little deeper on a heart that is broken wide open.  Building up walls of protection or hardening my heart would be easier, but I vowed from day one not to do that.  And each passing day brings me further away from Ryan and that just plain hurts.  Will I survive?  Yes.  Will I find hope and joy?  Yes.  But will the road there and the many seasons I have to pass through along the way be difficult and painful?  Definitely yes. 

this is one way to find joy on a cold
heartbreaking autumn day -  homemade
pumpkin spice lattes

"We never really do anybody much good unless we share the deepest experiences of our souls."  -Frank Laubach



I took this fall picture in 2014, in Virginia



sunset

Just some time visiting at sunset, on the last day of summer.

Dallas Willard quote

I just love Dallas Willard's teachings.  A quote from tonight:

"We live in America where it is a sin to suffer. It is a sin not to be just flowing with pleasure and joy al the time. That's stupid. It's okay to suffer. It's okay to be in pain... and in fact much of the suffering in America comes from the pain of not being able to suffer. And the acceptance of suffering and pain... will cut the quantity of it by a tremendous degree."  
- Dallas Willard, Kingdom of God Teaching Series, How to Be a Disciple

BeThe1To

It is possible to reduce deaths from suicide like we have reduced fatalities from heart disease and other leading causes of death.  A person dies by suicide every 12.8 minutes.  For every person who dies by suicide annually, there are another 278 people who have thought seriously about suicide, and nearly 60 who have survived a suicide attempt, the overwhelming majority of whom will go on to live out their lives.  There is hope for prevention, healing, and recovery - know the five steps to helping a person in crisis!

1. Ask

2. Keep Them Safe

3. Be There

4. Help Them Connect

5. Follow Up

click here for more details on each step #bethe1to

*Information shared by the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for National Suicide Prevention Month and beyond.

visit the bethe1to website for more resources

quote

"I am inwardly fashioned for faith, not for fear.  Fear is not my native land; faith is.  I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil.  I live better by faith and confidence than by fear, doubt and anxiety.  In anxiety and worry, my being is gasping for breath - these are not my native air.  But in faith and confidence, I breathe freely - these are my native air."  - E. Stanley Jones

National Suicide Prevention Month

C.S. Lewis wrote, "If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them... They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.  If you are close to it, the spray will wet you; if you are not, you will remain dry."

As we go into September again, which is National Suicide Prevention Month, I keep coming back to those words – if we are not close to our Great Fountain, we remain dry.  But those experiencing suicidal thoughts have an illness that literally changes their brain so that they believe they are not near to that glorious and joyful fountain of God's love, when in reality they are!  They are so close – “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt. 5:3)

Depression and suicidal thoughts lie.  They tell a person that they are not close to God and then the enemy fills all the holes in a person's soul with a deep sadness as those lies become their reality.  The enemy of our souls creates depression to try to separate us from the love of God.  Our enemy knows there is no way to defeat our God head on, so he looks for cracks and vulnerabilities that he can use.  And as suicidal tendencies sneak themselves into a person’s subconscious, that person begins to think it is them having these thoughts, not the disease.  I imagine that has to be a maddening, scary, and hopeless place to be – watching these thoughts invade your mind and not knowing where they come from or how to battle them by yourself as they become your reality.  And yet, the scariest thing is probably not feeling like having a safe place to release these thoughts as they continue to grow.

You see, depression once it is inside, can then spread like fire, taking over the mind and the heart and the soul with its awfulness.  It is persistent and stubborn, causing a physical pain throughout the whole body.  It holds on tight when a person attempts to fight against it with truth, whispering its lies even more insistently, to keep the truth from defeating it.  And those whispers can become shouts if there is any forward progress towards defeating it, as the enemy desperately does not want to give up any foothold it has gained.  Have you ever noticed how everything seems worse or hopeless when you are exhausted or stressed out?  But usually things seem more okay when you are well-rested, healthy, and surrounded by other believers?  It is because the enemy knows his attacks are useless when faced with the full power of God.  But if he can sneak his way into our weaknesses, he can gain some ground.  I believe that the more depression or PTSD or stress take root in a person, the stronger the enemy’s attacks become.

And so a person’s world becomes pills, prayer, exercise, mindfulness, supplements, sunshine, therapy, but if they loosen their grip, even just a little bit, those suicidal thoughts flood their way back into the brain and a person find themselves spinning down into that painful consuming fire once again.  And each fall back into the flames can be a little bit worse and even scarier as the disease progresses.  My husband, Ryan, described this process as a bandage being ripped off a partially healed wound over and over again, with greater pain each time.

Sometimes living this painful fight becomes too awful and consuming to continue to endure, to the point that a person begins to seek out any emergency exit they can find to escape.  For those of us with healthy minds, this may seem hard to relate to but remember this is not just a “sad mood” that a person can “snap out of.”  Mental illness is a disease of the brain.  Suicide is our nation’s second leading cause of death (specifically among individuals between the ages of 15 and 34).  Just as our hearts, livers, kidneys, etc. malfunction, so can our brains.  Think about the complexity of which God created our minds, something so complex can malfunction just as much, if not more, than any other vital organ in our bodies.

And for Christians, suicide does not mean a lack of faith.  Like any other life-threatening physical disease, if we do not seek help, death is usually the inevitable result.  When someone dies from cancer or heart disease we don’t say, “If only they had focused on God and had a little more faith.”  It is my opinion that those suffering from mental illnesses, who have faith, do want to focus on God's truth and do seek Him, perhaps even more desperately than those of us with healthy minds!  However, sometimes the illness is so aggressive, so consuming, it takes over.  It clouds their vision of God's truth and it blurs any vision of God’s presence.  And as if that were not enough, it goes to the next step and convinces this precious person that those lies are the absolute truth.  Day after day, consuming them with falsehoods, leaving them thirsting for God’s living water.

A person having suicidal thoughts is reacting to their painful reality.  Think of a person in a burning building, looking desperately for any escape, even if it is the window many stories up.  They are searching for ways out because they do not have water to quench the fire.  We all need to know how near the Great Fountain is to us.  The “water" in this fountain is God's truth and the beauty in His creation.  I believe most people spiraling towards suicide seek that truth with every bit of their being, wanting desperately to see it, grab hold of it, and survive.  I know my Ryan did.  He wanted to live and be healthy - he said so in his letters and by faithfully going to his mental health appointments week after week.  He wanted life.  He tried desperately to cling to it.  But if the fire gets too intense or too hot, it evaporates all that living water a person is urgently thirsting for.  And at some point a person is forced to take the only escape route they can.  It is not a choice.  Suicide is not a choice people make - it is the only available route they see.  Again, those of us healthy enough to not have suffered from depression may not fully understand this because we see and know that there are other exits.  But those in which the disease of depression has taken over have smoke clouding their vision and they do not see it.  Depression is a disease of deceptions masquerading as a person’s new reality.

I have come to understand that this was my husband’s reality.  This was the world in which he lived and fought against.  I now know how much he wanted to escape the pain and I am utterly amazed at how he was somehow strong enough to sit in that pain for such a long time, for the kids and I, just to be present for us.  And I know for certain my husband's perception of himself, during those final moments, was so far from reality that it is extremely difficult for my healthy mind to even understand.  And as painful and uncomfortable as it is to put myself there or to imagine, I am sharing all this with you because I do not want this to be your reality.  Or anyone you love’s reality.

A person in that state is experiencing an emergency, in the truest sense of the word emergency.  Depression can spiral to this hopeless point slowly over time or very unexpectedly and quickly, but when it does, a person needs immediate intervention and help.  They need the life-giving truth of God's word and love poured into them in the most urgent of ways.  If you know someone suffering depression or you suspect them of having suicidal thoughts, ask them, very straightforward and honesty if they are "okay."  But then wait for their answer and be ready to assist them in getting emergency help if their answer is anything less than a solid, "yes."  Someone in this country dies by suicide every 12.8 minutes.  22 veterans die by suicide each day in this country.  25 people harm themselves for every reported death by suicide.

I believe that understanding suicide, understanding the disease underneath it, and knowing how it works and progresses, is the one of the first steps to being able to step in and help a person fight against it.  We need to be there for others.  We need to listen to their stories and actively assist them in getting emergency help.  “Research shows people who are having thoughts of suicide feel relief when someone asks after them in a caring way.  Findings suggest acknowledging and talking about suicide may reduce suicidal ideation” (National Suicide Prevention website).  So let’s talk about this, not just in September, but all year long.  I am always here to listen.
Research shows people who are having thoughts of suicide feel relief when someone asks after them in a caring way. Findings suggest acknowledging and talking about suicide may reduce suicidal ideation.Research shows people who are having thoughts of suicide feel relief when someone asks after them in a caring way. Findings suggest acknowledging and talking about suicide may reduce suicidal ideation.Research shows people who are having thoughts of suicide feel relief when someone asks after them in a caring way. Findings suggest acknowledging and talking about suicide may reduce suicidal ideation.Research shows people who are having thoughts of suicide feel relief when someone asks after them in a caring way. Findings suggest acknowledging and talking about suicide may reduce suicidal ideation. Research shows people who are having thoughts of suicide feel relief when someone asks after them in a caring way. Findings suggest acknowledging and talking about suicide may reduce suicidal ideation.
*I add the disclaimer here that the statistics I quote are from the national suicide prevention website and are real numbers, but all the rest of this post is simply my thoughts and opinions, and I am not an expert by any means on mental illness.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Phone Number: 1-800-273-8255
https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

be there, it matters

https://www.taps.org/bethere