Sweet Sorrow: Finding Hope in the Face of Death

Today a friend of mine breathed her last breath and went to be with Jesus. I’m writing this through tears, but not for the reasons you might think. Please allow me a few minutes to explain; I promise it will be worth your time.

I haven’t known Julie long. Five weeks ago, a friend of mine from church called me and asked me to come speak with Julie. She explained that Julie had been battling liver and kidney disease for years and that the doctors had only given her a matter of weeks to live.

When I first saw Julie, she looked like she already had one foot in the grave. Her body was frail, her shoulders were bowed under the weight of her prognosis, and her eyes were haunted with a mixture of sadness and resignation.

Without thinking, I blurted the first greeting that came to mind: “Hi, I’m Eric. How’re you doing?”

She just looked at me with a look that said, “Really, that’s the best you’ve got?” and then she said matter-of-factly, “I’m dying.”

I may have held my smile, but inside I was thinking, “Mayday, Mayday!”

Over the next hour, Julie and I talked about the diagnosis, the overwhelming sadness, the fear she had as she faced her own mortality. She spoke of her concern for her husband, who had already lost both his parents and was in denial about her impending death. And as I listened, I heard Julie’s hopelessness. She was barreling at full speed towards a cliff in a car without a steering wheel and she was powerless to stop it, powerless to avoid the crash.

What do you say to someone who has no hope?
What words can you say that won’t come off sounding trite and dismissive?

I could only think of one thing to tell her, one thing that has given me hope in the midst of my own sorrow: words that comforted me as I held my wife’s hand through not one but two miscarriages. Words that I held onto like a drowning man as I watched my second-born son (born 11 weeks prematurely) laying in an incubator struggling to breathe through lungs that were not yet fully formed. I shared the words that gave me hope in the midst of my darkest valleys, when the shadow of death blotted out the sun and cast everything in somber shades of gray.

They are words that Jesus spoke to his disciples as he was sharing his last meal with them, as he was facing his own impending death. He looked at his closest friends and warned them, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world.”

There’s no way his disciples could have understood what he meant at that time; they were still thinking he was going to be a conquering king, not a suffering servant who would die to give us life. But Jesus’ words came to have deep meaning to them after that first Easter, when they saw the empty tomb and saw their risen Lord. His words gave them hope in the face of the trials and persecution they faced, and they continue to give hope to Christ-followers today as we live our lives in this sin-scarred world.

In this world we will experience pain, we will be persecuted for our faith, relationships will suffer, our bodies will break down, and we will taste death. BUT we can take heart in the fact that because of what Jesus did on the cross 2000 years ago and because of the fact that he rose from the dead, he has overcome the world. This is the hope that we have in Jesus, that the brokenness of this world doesn’t get the last word: that broken relationships don’t get the last word, that broken bodies don’t get the last word, that kidney and liver failure don’t get the last word and that even the grave doesn’t get the last word.

God does.

I shared this with Julie as she sat staring at her hands, lost in her thoughts. And I told her that I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she was going through, but that Jesus could. He’d faced his own mortality, embraced it willingly, because he loved us more than he feared the suffering he was about to endure. But he also rose from the grave, conquering death and declaring once and for all that sin and brokenness and death don’t get the last word. I told Julie that because Jesus is alive, she didn’t need to face what was coming alone. She could invite him to walk with her through this, as her comforter and guide.

Julie chose to embrace Jesus as her savior and her lord that day. She accepted the gift of grace that he’d bled out on a cross to purchase for her. And I left her with a hug and a promise to follow up with her in a few days.

Later that week, I went to visit Julie and her husband Dan at their home. When I saw her, I once again said the first thing that sprang to mind, “How’re you doing?” (I’m a slow learner). Now, keep in mind, she was still dying, her body was still emaciated and frail, but she looked at me with eyes that were full of hope and she said, “I’m tired, but I feel at peace in the midst of this.” She had a totally different countenance, because she knew that because of her faith, her disease won’t get the last word.

That day, she requested two things of me: First, she asked me to baptize her as a public declaration of her decision to follow Jesus for the rest of her brief life and beyond. And then she asked me to officiate her funeral. Talk about conflicting emotions. Of course I said yes, though like her husband I wanted to focus on the former, not the latter.

So three weeks ago, I gathered with Julie, her husband and 20 of her closest friends on Balboa Island to celebrate her commitment to following Jesus. And you know what? Far from being a depressing memorial service for a dying woman, it was a celebration of a living hope in her living Savior and Lord.

                         

This morning, Julie’s body gave up the fight. She spent her final hours laying in a hospital bed, with her husband Dan laying next to her, holding her frail body as a morphine drip took the edge off her pain. And then, at 5:30 this morning, Julie passed from her husband’s arms into Jesus’ arms. She is out of pain, free from the brokenness of this sin-scarred world.

Goodbye, Julie. Thank you for all you’ve taught me in the short time I’ve known you. I will miss talking with you, miss getting encouraging voice mails telling me you’re praying for me, miss getting to pray with you. But I take solace in the knowledge that I will see you again – that your death doesn’t get the last word.

God does!

Marriage: Contract or Covenant?

God designed marriage as a covenantal relationship between two imperfect people and Himself. He is the third strand that strengthens it and protects a relationship from being easily broken. But we live in a contract-based society.

Take our cell-phones for instance. I go into the store and pick out a phone. If I were to simply buy the phone it would cost me $700, but if I sign a 2-year contract that says I’ll buy my cell service from them every month, they will give me the phone for $100. They scratch my back so that I’ll scratch theirs. But what if I find a better plan a few months later? No problem, I can just pay a sum of money and break the contract. The tacit agreement between the consumer and the producer is this: So long as the producer supplies me with something that meets my expectations at a price that I’m willing to pay, they will get my business. However, as soon as they are no longer meeting my expectations or the cost exceeds my perceived value or there is someone offering a better product at a smaller cost, then I’m out. 

Now, this works well in a consumer-based society; in fact, that’s what drives our economy. But it becomes a dangerous mindset to bring into a marriage, because marriages are not intended to be contracts, but rather covenants. What’s the difference? Well, it all comes down to our focus. A contract is me-focused (I enter into it to meet my needs.) A covenant is we-focused (we enter into it to mutually meet one another’s needs).

Contract                          vs.                        Covenant
What will it take?	Whatever it takes!
I’ll meet your needs IF you meet mine.	I’ll strive to meet your needs, regardless.
I’ll meet you half way.	I’ll give 100%.
What do I get?  (self-focused)	What can I give? (Other-focused)
For as long as we both shall love.	For as long as we both shall live.
Conditional and impermanent.	Unconditional and permanent.

Our society treats marriage as a legal contract that can easily be dissolved or broken for any number of reasons: “We fell out of love.” “He just wasn’t meeting my needs” (in other words, he wasn’t living up to my expectations). “We have irreconcilable differences.” This, by the way, is the number one reason people give for divorcing. And it’s undoubtedly true, because every couple has irreconcilable differences. Every couple is made up of two people who have different perspectives and different desires, and no matter how similar they are they will always have differences. The question is what do we do when we come face to face with them?

If you view your marriage as a contract, then as soon as you run face-first into one of your differences, you will naturally begin to look for an out. You will begin to compare your marriage to your perception of others’ marriages, or you will begin to resent your spouse for failing to live up to their end of the agreement. Suddenly, you find yourself flirting with the idea that this isn’t your fault, you just married the wrong person. And once you begin to embrace that idea, you’ve unwittingly unlocked the back door to your marriage.

But if you view your marriage as a covenant rather than a contract, then you will recognize that there simply is no backdoor to marriage. Despite what our society or our legal system say, the marriage bond is permanent, not because we are perfect people who perfectly keep our vows, but rather because it was God who unites us as husband and wife. Jesus himself said that “what God has joined together, no man has the authority to separate” (Matthew 19:6). In other words, the covenant between a husband, wife and their God is unconditional and permanent.

This alters the way we approach our differences, doesn’t it? When there is no back door to marriage, this means that we are in it for the long haul, despite our differences and disappointments. Since there’s no backing out, when we encounter conflict as we inevitably will, it does us no good to grow resentful and detached. Instead of pulling away, the covenant reminds us to lean in and fight for our marriage – this includes working through the disagreements, seeking to understand one another’s perspective, and striving to articulate our perspective in a tone and manner that won’t put our spouse on the defensive. The covenantal perspective of marriage reminds us that we are one flesh, partners unified in our commitment to God and one another, not for a season or until we’ve lost that loving feeling, but for the rest of our lives.

This may sound like a heavy burden - a life sentence even - but it is really a blessing. Since there’s no backdoor to marriage, it forces us to work through the hard stuff and face our differences head on. And as the saying goes, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I can say from experience that my marriage has not only survived but thrived because my wife and I couldn’t run away from our conflict. Sure we fight and we get emotionally overwhelmed at times, but at the end of the day we both know that God can help us navigate around any obstacle we face, even if we don’t see a way through. And so, after a brief cooling off period, we turn our hearts back towards our spouse and, with God’s help, we get back to work, because we know that we’re not in it alone. God is with us, and if He’s with us, even our irreconcilable differences don’t stand a chance.