Chaplain's Corner

It was a shock. Some of us had worked with him for 30 or more years; I myself for half that time. We saw him at work one day; the next morning we found out he was gone. As I stood in one of the offices and talked with two of the staff about what happened, one of the gals said, “I guess we just never know when our time will come.” How right she was.

When a sudden, unexpected death happens in “our world”, you know – that small circle of people, places and relationships that provide the environment and context for our lives – it shocks us. Now it is not that we are not aware that people die suddenly every day. If you work in a hospital we get used to death, it happens every week, sometimes a couple of times a day. These people that we cared for professionally, these people that we cared for personally are all important and when they die “their world” mourns their passing; but the nature of this environment is that death takes place, the room is soon filled by another person needing our care and generally the deaths do not impact us deeply.

But what about this instinctive response to a sudden death: “I guess we never know when our time will come.” We don’t. There is no way that we can have foreknowledge related to when we will die. We get up each day assuming that today will be pretty much like all the days before. The day this article is published, if I am still alive and I may not be, I’ll have gotten up 22,758 mornings and lived each of those 22,758 day as if I had thousands more to live.

This expectation that we have a long time to live serves a couple purposes in our lives. First, it allows us to have dreams and plan. If I woke up each day with the dread that this was my last day on earth;  I probably would have never finished high school, or college or seminary. I probably wouldn’t have gotten married nor had a family. I would probably be sitting, paralyses by fear in the basement of some house in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Second, living with the expectation of living long allows us to live with hope. One definition of hope that I like is “hope is being sure that there is something good coming right around the corner.” Most of us live with varying degrees of hope. We launch out into each day believing there’s something good for us out there. You may have met people or had the experience yourself when all your hope died. There was a period in my life that I lost hope, I dreaded the sunrise and when I went to bed, I prayed that I would die in the night, because each day was so full of pain, so full of dread, so full of believing that there was nothing good left in life for me.

It’s good to pause on those days that the sudden death of a friend or colleague hits close to home. It is good to ask, “Were that to happen to me this evening, would I be ready to leave this earth permanently?” It is a good thing to take a personal inventory from time to time. It is a good thing to sit back and do an assessment of our relationships with family and friends and with God. It’s a good thing to be aware that life could be over for any one of us before the end of any one of our days. But it is not good to live under the crushing despair of death.

Never lose touch with your mortality, but live every day. Life is for living, not for dreading the grave.