Overcome by grief and exhaustion, I looked at my dying husband and imagined a machine that was about to stop running after 77 years. Then for a moment I imagined the possibility of a soul arising from all that. But I didn’t see anything. And when it was all over, I believed that was it. That was all.
An atheist friend, dead a couple of years earlier, ridiculed me for suggesting Heaven and Hell. With arrogant self-certainty he declared “we’re not going anywhere.” I believed he was right and I was wrong.
Now I see that he was really trying to convince himself that there is no God. He didn’t want to believe in a God that is so holy, a God that is sure to send the unrepentant sinful creature to Hell.
Death is never pretty for the damned. As an ungodly rebel, however, I wasn’t afraid of death. I wasn’t afraid of it when my husband was dying, when all those people in hospital were dying. It’s natural, I thought. True enough. But what I didn’t realise was that “natural” is a fallen, cursed, damned man.
My atheist friend called Jesus ‘my pal.’ For him, everybody had a right to their religious beliefs, including his own atheistic convictions. But his death, like everyone else’s, wasn’t pretty.
Congestive heart failure took him alone, in a cramped little room full of objects of achievements, failures, relationships, memories. He was a lad of social media, posting every single moment of his mortality on Facebook, his insulting humour, his political rants, his artistic productions. They have removed the images now, but his Facebook profile was decorated with a resolve not to be afraid of death, the last enemy: various artistic photographs of oxygen masks, skulls and blood stained paper napkins.
Nowadays, I can’t claim to know any better other than what is revelation in the Bible. I feel as if I have no choice but be this, this broken penitent never ever desiring to return to that broad and crowded path again. I may choose to turn away from God but this time it is so hard, it has deep, painful and real consequences within me, as if my soul was breaking.
Why did You choose me for Your will and good pleasure, oh God? I am saved!
Behold all these things God does to a man, two or even three times,
Job 33:29
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.
Philippians 2:12-13