Death has always haunted me. I came to the faith as a shaking, silent seven-year-old, creeping into the dark of a hotel room to ask my father what I had to do to avoid death and get to heaven. The fear that night shaped me, molded my mind and found its way into my muscles. It drew me into asking the question, which was my salvation. So, great good came from haunting evil that night.
Years later, at 18, as I stared down at my father’s limp and decaying body, shaking and silent again at the ghost of death taking away the shepherding giant of my life, I wept. Death had come to haunt me and my hero. I’d nearly forgotten about death, lived many years without acknowledging his presence in every room. But no more. I had what counselors tell me was a PTSD response to his passing that June evening, which rolled into a full-blown anxiety disorder that’s followed me around for fifteen years.
Death comes back regularly—when leukemia claims your dear grandmother, when spinal cancer comes for your friend at 31, when a car crash claims that basketball teammate you were never that close to, when pancreatic tumors steal away a sage in the faith and threaten a new friend with an early end. Oh, death . . .
My nerves get the better of me when death haunts. Almost immediately my heart starts moving faster, sensing a threat like a wild animal. Hypervigilance takes over. I feel out of control, and then I feel embarrassed and ashamed for feeling out of control. Isn’t my faith stronger than this? Shouldn’t I be able to stare death in the face and smile? Why am I still so haunted by this ancient ghost? What should I do?
What We Do
We know those bold and brilliant verses from Paul:
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:54–55)
I haven’t put on the imperishable yet. That’s the problem. I have faith that death is swallowed up in victory. I have faith that its sting has vanished. But what do we do when the ghost of death is still haunting us?
We stare at eternity. When we stare at what’s in front of us, the world can seem to fracture and fall apart. We lose heart. Faith slips through our fingers. We despair. But when we stare at eternity, we anticipate. We dream. We hope for what’s coming. And we remember something that’s so easy to forget when death is haunting us: we are immortal. That ridiculous claim is the clear implication of Jesus’s words: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26). “Never die.” That’s immortality. If you and I believe in Jesus Christ, we are immortal.
That immortality is pointing right into the gates of eternity. That’s our destination. That’s what lies before us—not cancer or heart trouble or alheizmers. Those things just get in the way. Our destination can’t even be thwarted by death or by our own paralyzing fear of it. Eternity is coming for us, not just death. We. Are. Immortal.
Our destination can’t even be thwarted by death or by our own paralyzing fear of it. Eternity is coming for us.
The grief and fear and doubt we deal with when death haunts us is troubling because it’s blinding. It gets in the way of our clear vision of eternity. It calls us to question our immortality. But we can see past the ghost of death. In fact, if we’re staring at eternity, we can see right through him.
I was always told not to stare as a child. Like all advice, it only applies to certain contexts. Staring is the best advice we can give others and ourselves in the context of death. Stare at Christ in his resurrected glory. Stare at the Spirit’s ongoing support of your tired soul. Stare at the gates of eternity and point: “There. There. There. That’s where I’m going. Christ, you made me immortal.” I need to get better at staring.
Death can haunt and jab and shove.
It can bind your heart and blind your eyes.
It belittles hope and joy and love.
It pulls your vision from the skies.
But Christ broke through the dark of death.
He calls us in and lifts our chins,
So we can live within his rest
And stare at the gates where life begins.