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!