Every once in a while, you begin to ponder things much bigger than yourself. I hope that you do this weekly (it’s called ‘worship’). But I take that for granted as much as the next guy. This month, I’ve had to ponder something related that has hit me much harder than I first realized.
When you’re young, you are indestructible. You live forever. You have no concept of life being finite, even as you profess belief in afterlife or have family or friends pass away. I don’t know, something about preparing to get married and enter ‘the real world’…but those feelings are leaving me.
A close friend of my family, Tim Stevens, died earlier this month. I saw him for the first and last time since he had gotten sick on Christmas Eve. Tim was a strong, hearty man, and I was blown away by how withered he was when I saw him. Last Tuesday, Heath Ledger, a popular actor, died of an apparent drug interaction. He was only 7 years older than I. And the guy in the photo is my friend Caleb.
Caleb found out on Friday that he’s got lymphoma. Cancer.
He’s 19.
Suddenly death becomes all too real, and its ‘unknown’ quality becomes VERY present. No matter what you believe about where you go when you die, there is a hint of fear, a hint of darkness, of finality, about death. No one in modern times has ever come back.
I know I’m a Christian; I believe Christ died to cover my sins and to reconcile me before God, and I will exist after this life in a life fuller than I can ever imagine. But I wish that faith was stronger, that it could drive out the slight chill you feel when you realize you might have said goodbye to a friend last night…and that the goodbye you said might just very well be that – goodbye.
Pray for Caleb, and I’ll be updating this again soon. Pray for me, too – my prayer is as the dead girl’s father, “I believe; help my unbelief!”
When you’re young, you are indestructible. You live forever. You have no concept of life being finite, even as you profess belief in afterlife or have family or friends pass away. I don’t know, something about preparing to get married and enter ‘the real world’…but those feelings are leaving me.
A close friend of my family, Tim Stevens, died earlier this month. I saw him for the first and last time since he had gotten sick on Christmas Eve. Tim was a strong, hearty man, and I was blown away by how withered he was when I saw him. Last Tuesday, Heath Ledger, a popular actor, died of an apparent drug interaction. He was only 7 years older than I. And the guy in the photo is my friend Caleb.
Caleb found out on Friday that he’s got lymphoma. Cancer.
He’s 19.
Suddenly death becomes all too real, and its ‘unknown’ quality becomes VERY present. No matter what you believe about where you go when you die, there is a hint of fear, a hint of darkness, of finality, about death. No one in modern times has ever come back.
I know I’m a Christian; I believe Christ died to cover my sins and to reconcile me before God, and I will exist after this life in a life fuller than I can ever imagine. But I wish that faith was stronger, that it could drive out the slight chill you feel when you realize you might have said goodbye to a friend last night…and that the goodbye you said might just very well be that – goodbye.
Pray for Caleb, and I’ll be updating this again soon. Pray for me, too – my prayer is as the dead girl’s father, “I believe; help my unbelief!”
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