Death

“In a day or two I’ll be dead.”²⁸ 

Death is an inescapable part of all our lives. Death comes in varying degrees: the departure of loved ones to faraway places, loss of health and vitality through serious illness, personal failure, loss of a job, of money, of hope. And there is the crushing sadness of permanent loss of a life. 

But the death of anything and anyone can open a passageway for the new. Charlotte dies after spinning her egg sac, but all 514 of her children hatch, and life begins again. Author Christy Wright asserts that “endings make new beginnings possible.”²⁹ She admonishes her readers to stop regretting and lamenting past seasons. 

For the believer in Christ, His death gives us new life. Our death here is the entrance to glory. “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21). Madeleine L’Engle recounts sitting in her grandmother’s lap after a funeral. “That evening we sat out on the porch and listened to the ocean rolling into shore and I sat in my grandmother’s lap, and she sang to me ‘Jesus Tender Shepherd,’ and I knew that despite the nearness of death I was loved, and that love was stronger than death.”³⁰ 

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more” 

(Rev. 21:4). 

Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, by your death you took away the sting of death: Grant to us your servants so to follow in faith where you have led the way, that we may at length fall asleep peacefully in you and wake up in your likeness for your tender mercies’ sake. Amen.” (The Book of Common Prayer) 

The Gardener

Suzanne U. Rhodes in Weather of the House

The Gardener

I haven’t talked to you about
a dark space I dug up.
Clods and rocks I can pick out of soil,
blue-veined clay I can nourish;
weeds, yank up; shade, cut back.
But this

hollow where no seed is meant to grow
astounds. I go back to basics,
trusting my hands to find the dirt
as it always was, humid and maternal,
easily worked to hatch seeds,
but this

breach of earth voids every breathing
speck so that the spade of my hand
weighs more than death and the leaves
I touch are stillborn. Tell me,
must I keep tending, must I
turn this

blank into myself and vanish,
or is the hole an entrance
into some new ground that is yet
familiar, tilled and fertile, vast
as my loss, tenderly sown with
this?

Suzanne U. Rhodes
(in Weather of the House)