As I write this, looking out at a hopping street with folks running, walking dogs, walking by at a quick pace, I see a beautiful cat walking down the sidewalk. This cat has no home. We're not sure where she came from, and no one knows where she goes. But she lives. She is fed by the neighbors. She has not been petted in the months we've been at this church because she rejects humankind for life on her terms. But she's alive, and healthy, and astonishingly free.
She is watched over by a God who cares for all his creatures. I believe that.
And so, dear friends, are we. I say that knowing I'm going to write about a dark subject, knowing that God is watching me type.
Not sure this one will find much joy but I hope it shows a degree of hope, for in talking death and dying one sometimes can't find a drizzle of either.
The news of her death came like a bolt of lightening. She had decided she had more living to do, then she decided she didn't. I tried to understand both decisions.
Here's the story: Brittany Maynard ended her life Saturday. She was 29, just three weeks short of her 30th birthday. She had been in the news because she had a terminal condition, brain cancer, and she and her husband Dan Diaz had moved to Portland, Oregon because she could then take advantage of the Oregon law that allows taking deadly drugs if one's condition is without hope and suffering is constant.
"She died as she intended -- peacefully in her bedroom, in the arms of her loved ones," said Sean Crowley, a family friend.
And I must say it should cause us all to think.
Let's ponder this. I was taught early that suicide is a sin that will send you straight to hell without the proverbial hand basket. But be careful here. This is as gray and area as there is in scripture. God simply didn't send out much to go on.
Heck, many of the stained glass heroes of scripture faced overwhelming depression and sometimes wrote they wished they had never been born, including (most often) King David, a real manic depressive in Jeremiah, and certainly Job. Job says at one point, "I would choose strangling and death instead of my bones. I reject life; I don't want to live lone; leave me alone, for my days are empty."
I reject life, he says.
The interesting thing to me, maybe only to me, is that God does not address the word suicide in black and white. The Bible is for all intents and purpose silent on this. Remember, the only unpardonable sin is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. The Bible says that in black and white (or in red, as the case might be). The only unpardonable sin, therefore, is to reject Christ as the Messiah, the Savior, the one who died for our sins -- which is taught by the Holy Spirit most often.
So, a true believer affected by mental illness who then in the depth of depression kills oneself ... I'll let God judge that.
But this missive isn't about death. It's about life. I've often thought, as I've aged twice as fast as my friends and as I've looked around and found myself alone at times except for my dear wife and a passel of pets, I don't want to live if I have ALS or Alzheimer's or Dementia or something in that area code. I won't have money to live in a nursing home, so that's out. I have pretty constant pain and I live with that, so I'm not all that worried about living long with pain. But if I lose the ability to think, to write, to live what is my life, I'm not sure I want that.
Oh, I know. Submit to the will of the Lord and all that. I'm just saying, not being able to move or to think seems to me to be a very limited description of life. I'm simply being truthful.
So, let's go full circle. The lovely Mrs. Maynard decided she wanted to die with dignity. There is no mention that I've found of her religious beliefs, but I know Jesus loved her and I suspect he understood her in ways that none of those previously mentioned family and friends do or did.
So, if Mrs. Maynard believed that Jesus was the son of God raised from the dead, and if she professed it with her mouth, I believe she was greeted moments after dead with that haunting but wonderful phrase "That's one of mine" by the son of God.
The truth is that though the Bible never mentions suicide directly, it speaks of of life throughout its pages. God is the god of the living, Jesus says at one point. But I also know this, he created us all, loves us all and accepts those deep, dire, depressing moments as well. Otherwise, what's the use of all this?
I've lost three friends all around my age or a bit older in the past two years. I've lost a couple of friends from my youth to prison sentences that I still find incredibly unbelievable. I have debts, and a lack of planning for the future that will leave me in terrifying territory when I finally retire from all this.
But through it all, I choose life. Why? Because I still believe that there might be something in one of these things that touches someone. That I still believe there is the slim but real possibility that God will use me to affect the life of someone who doesn't choose life. That time isn't heading toward the end but toward a new beginning. That all this has purpose and reason and even at times a bit of rhyme.
That I'm not ready to say goodbye to those I love.
Till God calls me home.
My guy, the apostle Paul said it this way:
"It is my expectation and hope that I won't be put to shame in anything. Rather, I hope with daring courage that Christ's greatness will be seen in my body, now as always, whether I live or die. Because for me, living serves Christ and dying is even better. ... But I don't know what I prefer. I'm torn between the two because I want to leave this life and be with Christ, which is far better."
Get that? Dying is better. To be with Christ.
See, I believe one of the reasons the Bible doesn't talk about the rightness or wrongness of suicide is that if it was declared in black and white that to die is fine if circumstances are dire, then those who love Jesus with all their heart, mind and spirit would indeed always choose death.
Which eliminates hope, in life.
Which deadens life in hope.
Bottom line is this, I will cling to life -- still trying to do the next right thing -- knowing that in the end, whenever that might be, I will see the one who made the last 20 years or so so wonderful, who comforted me despite my rejection of him in the 20 years before that, and who loved me in the first 20 years of my life though I seldom knew that.
To be with Jesus is the goal.
To be in this world is the truth.
That's life. Till it's not.
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