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."