Death Will Die

I left a meeting this morning and looked at my phone. I missed call and voicemail from my mom urging me to call her, and a text message to me and my siblings saying the same.

I knew.

When I wasn't able to get my mom on the phone, I called my dad. He was the one who told me that my grandma is now in Heaven.

It feels messy. Messy because she was 98 years old. She lived through multiple world wars, the Great Depression, raising children, her two daughters going through painful and messy divorces, losing her husband while he was in his 80s, a broken hip, uterine cancer, the works. Yet, she met her grandchildren and her great grandchildren. She was loved and well cared for. She was relatively healthy most of her life. She placed her faith in Jesus in her 80s after thinking her whole life that she had to be good to go to Heaven and finally learning she could rest in Jesus' goodness instead. She had a really difficult last year and an especially painful last month. But all in all, she had the life that people want - a long, relatively healthy life where they are loved and can be with family - and she died in her (morphine induced) sleep.

So this whole journey towards her death has filled me with emotions. Because a 98 year old dying feels really different than a 35 year old dying. G's death feels like he and we were robbed of the things Grandma got to have - watching a child become an adult, meeting grandkids and great grandkids. Being young and healthy with relatively few health troubles before her 80s. It isn't a shock for someone to die in their late 90s. And Grandma even said many times that she was ready to die. She had watched all her loved ones (except her children) die. She had lots siblings, parents, in-laws, friends. She had done all that anyone could do and was now deteriorating.

When my mom would call me and be in denial that her mother was dying or feel like it was happening too soon - I'd feel anger. Injustice. It's not a tragedy that Grandma is dying, I wanted to scream. The tragedy is that my husband died!

But all death is a tragedy. It's not how it's supposed to be. It's not "natural". We long for life. We cling to it. We cling to those we love. The wrenching away and finality that death brings is almost incomprehensible. It's all around us and yet we fight against it. It's not how it was meant to be.

And that's what I see in the Bible. Our resistance to death, our hatred of it, our desire to not accept it - to ignore it, to flee it, to hurt it - its all because we were made for eternity. We were made for life. We are embodied people. Never meant to be separate from our Creator or the bodies that he created for us.

1 Corinthians 15:24-26 says, " Then comes the end, when he (Jesus) delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death."

THE LAST ENEMEY TO BE DESTROYED IS DEATH!

Sometimes I want to scream that death can go to Hell. And it will. Death will die. Jesus has defeated death and he will destroy it forever. Death doesn't get the final say. Oh no. Jesus does. Life does. Hope does. Eternity does.

Today, I want to say that my Grandma's death - and every death - is a tragedy. It is living in a broken sin-soaked world that leads to the finality of death, the wrenching away of loved ones, the pain and agony of going from life to death. But it will not always be so.

Jesus defeated death when he rose from the grave. My Grandma and my G are with him today because he defeated death. And one day, when death is no more, we will all worship Jesus together, embodied, united, forever. Full to the bursting of life that will never, ever end.