A song by Sara Groves raises a meaningful question many of us relate to:
“I have a friend who just turned eighty-eight and she shared with me that she’s afraid of dying. I sit here, years from her experience, and try to bring her comfort. I try to bring her comfort. But what do I know? What do I know? I don’t know that there are harps in heaven or the process of earning your wings. I don’t know of bright lights at the ends of tunnels or any of these things. What do I know? Really, what do I know?”
Even when I am able to move from the daunting emotional dimensions of death, I still find myself with more questions than answers. My faith in a loving and powerful God certainly helps me in the hopefulness department. The resurrected Redeemer declares that death is no longer a dead end subject, but rather a transition from life as we know it to life as we believe it could and should be. But the “unknown-ness” of death can remain unsettling. Sara’s question lingers: “Really, what do we know?”
One perspective that brings me a sense of peace is a more realistic sense of life--now and later. Eternal life isn’t somehow disconnectedly distanced from us on this planet. Eternal life is going on right now. We’re living in a smidgeon of a second of eternal life. Wonderful and/or wretched, it flies by at warp speed. Our earth-life is a part of eternal life, but it’s an infinitesimally, immeasurably small part of our forever life. It’s a chapter in our personal story of eternal life, or perhaps just a paragraph. Maybe just a breath.
The recorded message we hear as we approach the airport security line rings true in the big picture of an eternally connected life: “You will be required to take off your outer clothing before you can pass through this area en route to your departure.” Before you are free to fly, you’ve got to shed your exterior stuff. It’s just a covering, a cloak. It’s a cocoon. Sure, you’ve gotten comfortable in your own skin, but before you can proceed to your final destination, you need to lose it. As Maurine Waun says, “We are not bodies having a spiritual experience, we are spirits having a bodily experience.”
It’s a whole new, holy new way to grasp the reality of a full, complete, eternal life.
C. S. Lewis said it best: “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body”.
Don’t worry about my feelings. If you want to stop reading these ramblings and just camp on what Clive Staples said, do it. Here it is again—the perspective that changes everything: “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” You have a temporary tent. You’re walking around in a flesh and blood body bag that will eventually wear out and release the real, eternal you. What’s real is what lasts. You are a Soul.
And now back to Sara’s song. One more truth that sets us free: “What do I know? Really what do I know? I know to be absent from this body is to be present with the Lord, and from what I know of Him, that must be very good.” As we say in church, “Amen.”
Dennis Lynn
