Finding Life
I have an enchantingly odd mother who will do just about anything to get me to laugh – or to embarrass me. And on the rare occasion that she does do something so outrageous that it makes me blush, she always says to me, “you’re going to miss me when I’m gone.” It is true that I’ll miss my mom when she’s left this life and entered the next. And although my mother’s death seems so unreal, so distant as to make it an enigma, really the end of life comes very quickly. As David said in Psalm 39, “each man’s life is but a breath.”
Perhaps death seems so remote because I am still young – but I think to some extent none of us understand the nearness of death until it is upon us. In my 23 years, less than a handful of people that I’ve known well have passed away. I am no expert on pain and grief. Yet, in my lifetime a number of tragedies have shaken me and my generation: Columbine, September 11, the Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and most recently the Virginia Tech massacre this past April. Even though we all die sometime, these disasters embody the injustice, the dreadfulness, the untimeliness of death.
At Virginia Tech, students full of potential were taken well before their time – their brief lives made even briefer. There is nothing natural about their death, because when God first created humans he did not intend for any of us to die. But even if those students had lived long enough to know their grandchildren, death still wouldn’t be natural. We want to flee from death, most of us are afraid of it. We hope, beyond all reason, that it never happens to us. What is natural is our reaction to death – sadness, and mourning, the knowledge in our souls that a slow or sudden end of life is not the way it is supposed to be.
So, what do we do with the severity and reality of death? C.S. Lewis says, “If I find in myself a desire which nothing on earth can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We deny death because built into us is the hope that death is not the end. Even unbelievers, many of them, believe in some form of life after death.
Underneath the physical reality of death an even deeper truth is revealed: spiritual death. The world teaches us a great deal about the profound realities of life and death. The earth and all of its inhabitants, which God created out of nothing, is in a constant cycle of renewal and decay. Ancient mountains that once towered in the sky have dulled into nothing more than gentle silhouettes of their former selves; governments that were once great nations now hold little sway over rising world powers; springtime brings life bursting forth from the soil, flowers bloom, trees bud – everything is fresh and new, but come the end of fall, the leaves drop off the trees and the grass dies. The world becomes, once again, gray and dreary and dead.
But the story doesn’t end there – spring comes again, and new mountains emerge – hope, renewal, life. Spiritual death can be understood through the ebb and flow of all life on earth. Our souls are like the rubble of an ancient building – built to be great and beautiful but now corroded; only with the adept knowledge and precision of a master builder can the structure be pieced together into its former glory.
For a Christian, our understanding of death is twofold. As we age, our bodies slow down. We become frail, stooped, hard of hearing, and blind, eventually our body stops working completely and we die. But aging and death are more than a physical reality. Underneath our wrinkled skin is a soul that is, without Christ, already dead. Just as our ears grow hard of hearing the noises around us, our souls are hard of hearing the message of life and hope that Christ gives us.
When we die physically our soul is separated from the body. Spiritual death is our soul’s separation from God. The effects of death run deep. We grieve the loss of our family and friends because they have marked our lives. When they die it feels like a part of us dies, too. We are left broken with a crack running through us that our loved one once filled, like a split in the foundations of a house.
Spiritual death is much the same. When we are spiritually dead there is a place inside of us that is split apart; we desire wholeness, but what we have is a crack in the foundation – and we will do anything to try and repair the fissure in our souls. The division is unseemly, and broken, and without repair it could damage the rest of the building. If we try to mend our souls without the help of God, we will end up prying it further and further apart. Unless we have Christ, we are bound to sin, unable to stop the inevitable death of both our bodies and our souls.
In Romans 15: 20-23 Paul teaches us that,
“When [we] were slaves to sin, [we] were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did [we] reap at that time from the things [we] are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that [we] have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit [we] reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Every person’s soul is in peril, but the Good News is that it can be redeemed. Hope exists even when the eternal state of our soul is in question.
It’s possible to receive Jesus’ gift of life at any age. But the nature of college as a time of seeking and establishing one’s beliefs makes the offering of Grace especially opportune. In 2006 the Barna Group came out with a study that found 61% of twenty-somethings who as high schoolers were actively involved in church became completely disengaged from their faith during college. That statistic makes the university seem like a dark and dangerous place. In my own experience college was a time in which many of my friends lost their faith.
I went to a Lutheran school, and even there I watched as my friends took classes that challenged the foundation of their faith and they walked confidently away from Christianity. It was painful to listen to the cynicism that seeped into my roommate’s faith. Unfortunately, no one was there to help challenge her intellect in the other direction – to point her back to Christ, and all my efforts to do such were fruitless.
What she, and I suspect others like her, needed was a community to support and sustain her, to walk along side her and encourage her. At my school, such a community didn’t exist, or at least one that was actively seeking engagement with the campus. But because of the Grace of God in my life, I held fast to what I had been taught growing up, even as my roommate became bitter about faith. Without intentional encouragement from a group of people committed to Jesus, my roommate and I each found our own direction – me one way, her the other.
And yet, despite the startling statistics (and my own personal experience) college still remains a fertile time; students are open to new ideas, eager to learn and grow and be challenged. Many students lose their way because there is no one looking to bring them back; but that does not mean they are hardened. Like damp, rich soil they are ready for the gospel – if only people are there to help plant new seeds and come in due time to prune the foliage.
Our task, and InterVarsity’s mission, is to reach those students, and to talk to them about life on this earth and the next. We build communities that attest to the new life Christ brings to our souls. No one lives forever, but our souls exist eternally, whether or not they are fractured or whole. We must learn to face our mortality, and help others face it as well. To take life seriously requires that we live it to the fullest. And to really live means that every part of us is alive. We can not really live if our soul is dead, if we are separated from God. Only when we realize how short-lived our lives are, and that everlasting life can only come from the Father, do we find hope in this life and discover how to be alive.
Only in Jesus will people find life, along with their hope and their home. We should do everything we can to invite them into that hope. My life is still unfolding; and though I’m young now, time keeps moving. Someday my enchantingly odd mother will pass away, and then, eventually, so will I. But in the meantime I need to share with others what Christ has done for us all. Because when my life on earth is over, I, and others who have found their life in Christ, want to echo the words of Aslan from C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, “The term is over: the holiday has begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
Katie Montei is a writer who works at InterVarsity’s National Service Center.