Death
Does God Know Our Death Date?
I was at a funeral the other day and the pastor boldly stated,
“God knew the exact day ‘Bob’ was going to die. He knew we’d be sitting here today, mourning ‘Bob’s death. Not only did God know when ‘Bob’ was going to die, but he knows the exact day … the exact hour … and the exact second that you’re going to meet him face to face.”
Wow!
That’s a pretty bold statement.
I remember when I was young, I would often think to myself, “If God knows when I’m going to die, I wonder if he could tell me?”
He hasn’t told me yet … and I’m rather glad he hasn’t told me if he does indeed know.
I mean, can you imagine?
Can you imagine knowing the day, hour and second you’re doing to die? It might be depressing. Or it could cause us to live life up to the fullest. It could cause us to be the person we’ve always wanted to be, but could never find the motivation.
I think I’d put a countdown clock on my wall, that would display the amount of years, months, days and hours until my “Death Date”. Or maybe I wouldn’t want the clock … that might be rather unnerving.
It would certainly cause me to take out an insurance policy. If I knew I was going to die early, I could take out a huge insurance policy and let my wife live like Angelina Jolie after I die … she could adopt a whole country load of kids and buy that stretch limo HUMMER that she’s always wanted!
Or maybe I’d do everything in my power to beat death. Maybe on that specific day, I’d lock myself up in an atomic bomb shelter. Or maybe, I’d just check myself into a hospital the day before I’m supposed to bite the dust.
If you were sure God told you your death date, would you tell anybody else? I think I’d keep it quiet. For one, nobody would believe that God spoke directly to you … and they’d have an even harder time believing that he told you your date of demise.
Who knows what I’d do?
*****
So, what do you think? Does God know your death date? Below is a little survey you can take.
It’s all anonymous, so even though many people might consider the last two or three options as heretical, if indeed you choose one of those “heretical options”, you’ll still be an anonymous heretic.
And, if you’ve thought about stuff like this before (God’s foreknowledge, etc.) and want to talk about it, I’ll be happy to engage ….
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
Sacrifice, Honor and Funerals: The Death of Military Personnel
War is hell.
I don’t know that anybody likes it … especially the families that are sending their young men and women over to fight.
It’s tough, both physically and emotionally on both the soldier and the soldier’s family and friends. It pushes us to make decisions we’d never make in a perfect world. But those who do fight do so out of a sense of duty, a sense of sacrifice.
And sometimes those young men and women not only fight … they also die.
Their story ends in a crescendo that is as sad as their decision to serve was honorable.
*****
When I heard about the 30 military personnel (37 persons overall) who were killed when their helicopter got shot down this past week, it made me think about my friend, Cpl. Brandon Hardy.
I played ball with Brandon when I was young.
He had a great smile.
His smile was one that brought out all the good in his face … it made him look more handsome … it brought out his awesome eyes … and made him look more mischievous too.
I remember where I was when I found out that Brandon was KIA in Iraq in the spring of 2006.
I was sitting in the chapel at the funeral home with my mom and all her family, looking at my maternal grandfather as he lay in his casket. He had passed only a couple days earlier after a short battle with cancer. The quiet was disturbed by the sound of the phone, prompting my father to run from the chapel to the office.
After a couple minutes he came back with the disturbing news.
*****
Cpl. Brandon Hardy
I’ve never seen our community pull together to honor somebody the way they honored Cpl. Brandon Hardy that week. In fact, as long as I live I’ll remember.
I’ll remember how – on the night of Brandon’s viewing – we left the funeral home, escorted by the police, with the family in procession behind us, and as we headed to the church, which was located nine miles away. There – by the thousands – were people lining our path, some waving flags, others holding signs, “We Love You Brandon!” and “We’re Proud of Your Sacrifice”; others saluting as the hearse and family drove by; but all – together — honoring Brandon’s sacrifice.
It was the single greatest outpouring of honor and love I have ever seen.
*****
I live in a special community. A community that – at times – is close knit to a fault. A small town, where your bad activity is in the paper the day before you do it. But, where there’s real love and real concern for their own.
Over the next couple days, as those 37 service men and woman are laid to rest, I can only hope their respective communities can honor their sacrifice as ours did for Cpl. Brandon Hardy and his family. I can only hope that the families can have that one grace – the grace of community that responds to sacrifice with honor.
There’s nothing more honorable than sacrifice.
And there’s nothing more moving than when that sacrifice is given in death. And there’s nothing more powerful than when that sacrifice is responded to by a community, out of their love.
*****
If you would, say a prayer for the 37 families who lost loved ones this past week. I don’t know any of them, but I know many of them will be dealing with anger, bitterness and a pain that few of us know, and that the rest of us should be thankful we’ll never understand.
Pray that their communities can pull together in support and give the families the grace of honor in death.
It’s in sacrifice that we see the highest and best in humanity.
And it’s in honor and love that we see humanities highest and best response.
How Do I Know If I’m Dead?
It’s a pretty good question. Below I’ve provided some signs that may or may not implicate that you have died and gone to the next realm.
You should probably ask “Am I dead?” if …
… you turn on CNN and the breaking news reports that the government has decided there will be “No More Taxes!”
… you wake up, it’s dark outside and the temperature in your house is over 110 degrees
(NOTE: considering the current heat wave in the US, this sign may not be enough to conclusively confirm your demise … it should be seen as a concomitant factor which needs an addition sign to be absolutely conclusive. As it may feel like hell, rest assured you could experience this heat and still be very much alive).
… you don’t need coffee in the morning … or in the afternoon … or in the evening.
… you DON’T feel like a Zombie from both the tryptophan and the carb overload after a Thanksgiving meal.
…. you come home from work and there’s exactly 72 virgins in your house (in which case you’d also realize the Muslims were right).
… you’re laying in a coffin and notice people are filing by you, viewing your body (yes, it happened … except the person it happened to wasn’t dead yet).
…. you look down, and where your feet used to exist, there now exists hooves. Upon looking in the mirror you realize four things: 1.) you are now a cow. 2.) The hindus, etc. are right. 2.) Your previous life must have been pretty decent to earn the esteemed reincarnation position of cowhood … until 4.) you realize you’re not in India, but on a beef farm in Lancaster County.
… you’re walking down a yellow brick road and you see a Jewish guy with twelve of his Jewish buddies standing by some shiny fence work.
… you’re driving down a highway and suddenly enter Paradise, Pennsylvania or, you’re driving in Michigan and enter a little town called “Hell.”
… the whole town is spreading a rumor over Facebook that you’re dead (like the rumor that was spread about my uncle two weeks ago).
… your children are obeying your every command … all the time … before you have to tell them twice.
… you drink an entire 32 oz. slushy in less than a minute and you don’t get at brain freeze.
… Elvis is in your living room.
******
Are there any other signs that might cause you to question whether or not you’ve passed into the next life?
Dressing Dad
Today, Ken Knickerbocker and I are trading posts. Ken generously provides the residents of Parkesburg, Pennsylvania (which is where my wife and I reside) with “Parkesburg’s News and Happenings” at his website, Parkesburg Today, fulfilling a much needed service to our community.
On May 1st of this year Ken suffered the loss of his father. I’ve always thought one of the best things we can do as we experience loss is try and write our thoughts down. Not only has Ken done this, but he was gracious enough to share his thoughts here, allowing us to take part in his experience by sharing his lose of a parent, as well as the funeral rites he gave to his father, and the help provided him by a funeral director.
Sharing a personal grief experience with another is a sacred act, so read as though you are on sacred ground.
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A Photo of Ken's Father.
All alone laying on a table in the middle of a big empty room with only a hospital-like gown covering his body is how I found my father last week when my brother and I went to the Minshall Shropshire-Bleyler funeral home in Brookhaven a few miles southwest of Media, Pennsylvania to dress his body in preparation for the viewing and funeral service two days later.
My father had passed away three days earlier following a four year battle with cancer and Parkinson’s disease. He had taken a bad fall in January and ended up in the hospital with a fractured skull.
After his fall it was all downhill health wise for the poor man. Over the next four months until his death on May 1st he spent at most two, maybe three, weeks at home.
His passing, while sad, provided my father certain relief from his physical ailments and an increasingly frail, feeble existence.
Two days after he passed, I went to the funeral home with my stepmother and siblings to finalize arrangements for my father’s funeral and burial. Mike Okon, the funeral director, met us at the door, welcomed us, expressed sorrow for our loss and ushered us into the funeral home’s spacious conference room.
Mike sat patiently for an hour as my stepmother and I hammered out the wording of my father’s obituary and then reviewed the details of the itemized invoice line by line with her to ensure she understood and agreed with each of the several charges. At the end of the session Mike walked our family to the door remembering each of our names as he said goodbye.
Two days later my brother and I returned to the funeral home to dress my father. Dressing a body is not something one does every day but in our religious tradition men dress deceased males and women do the same for their departed sisters. Usually someone from the deceased person congregation is designated to dress the corpse but in my father’s case, my step mother assigned the task to my older brother Chuck and I.
While Chuck and I have been members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) since my parents joined the church in the late 1950’s, neither of us had much experience dressing a body. Chuck had never done it and I had only done it once, a few years back at the Wilde Funeral Home in Parkesburg under the watchful and ever helpful guidance of Bud Wilde.
Mike ushered us into the room where my Father’s body lay and turned to leave. Quickly, before he reached the door, I summoned Mike back and asked him to stay and assist us. He informed us he had never dressed a Mormon for burial and wasn’t sure how he could help.
Over the next hour Mike demonstrated all the attributes of the true professional. As my brother and I slipped slacks and a shirt, both white, over my father’s lifeless limbs, Mike showed us how to shift my father’s weight to position the clothes on his body. Once the shirt was buttoned, Mike tied the tie, also white, and slipped it over my Father’s head and under his shirt collar, tightening it perfectly around his neck.
Chuck placed socks and shoes, also white, on my father’s feet. Using tricks of his trade Mike filled out my father’s clothing to mask the weight dad had lost in the months leading up to his death. Finally, as Chuck and I placed the robes sacred to our faith over my father’s shoulders and around his waist, Mike made sure every crease and fold laid flat.
Thanks to Mike’s master’s touch in the hour it took to dress him, my father’s body was transformed from a lifeless corpse to a man ready to meet his maker.
A tranquil experience my brother and I won’t soon forget made possible by a consummate professional funeral director.
The God Who Remembers
I’m a funeral director. Have been for the past 10 years. And during those ten years, I’ve helped numerous families memorialize miscarriages and still born babies.
As a male who often finds himself in that “insensitive” category, I used to secretly wonder why there’s a desire to memorialize those not yet born.
After all, what’s to memorialize?
When I first became a funeral director, I struggled to understand how I could write an obituary for one who has no biography. After a year or so, I developed this three sentence template:
_____________ the stillborn son/daughter of ___________ and ____________ passed away on ____________________ at “so and so” hospital. Left to grieve this loss is the maternal and paternal grandparents, as well as the uncles and aunts. A memorial service will be held on ____________ at the __________ Funeral Home.
That’s it. No job occupations to write. No hobbies, memberships or significant others to be included in the obituary. In place of the age, the obituary will suffice to say, “infant”, or “stillborn”.
Being both insensitive and hardheaded, it took a pretty intense situation for me to see and feel the “what” and the “why” of memorializing those who weren’t afforded a chance to live.
I used to think that one of the most in house controversial topics for Christians related to the “eternal security” and/or “perseverance of the saints” discussions. I’ve seen artery popping, fist clenching, impassioned arguments over whether or not you can walk away from God and lose your entrance ticket for passage through the Pearly Gates.
I was wrong. There’s another topic that’s even more sacred.
I learned my lesson in a Degree Completion Class at Lancaster Bible College. There was a large cross-section of students in that class, with ages ranging from 25 to 62 and an even broader array of experience.
The professor breached a topic that he wished he hadn’t when he said, “There’s no absolute biblical evidence that fetuses and infants go to heaven.”
That was it. He had touched some major buttons that I don’t think he even realized existed.
Without even raising their hands, two outspoken women in the class – who, as we were soon to learn, had lost children – burst in with utter defiance. “How dare you speak to something so sensitive when you’ve never lost a child!” one said. Another burst into tears, asserting how God had spoken to her, reassuring her that her lost children were indeed with Him.
I’ve felt tension in classrooms, funerals and churches, but this was a tension that was raised to a level I didn’t know existed. Without knowing it, that Prof. had tread on one of the most sacred realms of Christian doctrine … the belief that ALL lives are loved and known by our Maker … that ALL are children of God.
Mother’s day is today.
This is the time of year that many mothers carry a silent grief. This is the time of the year when mothers remember, when they memorialize lost lives that the rest of us (their friends and family … especially us men) have unintentionally forgotten. And, specifically, it’s a time when men can be exceptionally insensitive to the grief that can reemerge during this holiday.
And there’s some women who will not only carry their silent grief this mother’s day, but who also NEVER had the chance to memorialize lives that God knows … because I know that for every one woman who has memorialized the death of the unborn or still born, there are many others who have not.
Today, God remembers you and your losses. There’s a scripture that says God bottles our tears, a word picture that says, “your tears are too precious to fall to the ground” … that when a person cries, it’s such a valuable experience to God that he stops what he’s doing, bends over and carefully watches every tear flowing down our broken faces. It’s as though he keeps those tears so he can remember what you have gone through … the same way we save items of sentimental value so those things can help us remember important experiences.
I invite you to remember that God not only remembers, but he also grieves with you.
