Despair or hope in the face of death

Tolstoy watched his children playing and was filled with a sense of meaningless knowing that those young people would one day be dust. He wrote, ‘What meaning has my life that the inevitability of death does not destroy.’

Wooden Allan once said, ‘It’s not that I am afraid to die, I just don’t want to be their when it happens.’ Later he wrote more sombre words in an article in Esquire magazine ‘Death is absolutely stupefying in its terror and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless. It makes our lives look as irrelevant as waves breaking over the sea shore.’

Jesus gives hope beyond death saying, 'I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die?' (John 11:25-26)

A student came from a tough home and had never had an easy life. When he came in contact with Christians he asked a lot of questions and put up a lot of resistance. Eventually he became a Christian. And almost immediately he was diagnosed as having cancer which had spread through his body with breathtaking speed. His Christian friends were terrified about going to see him. It wasn’t that they couldn’t handle seeing his ill body—it was that they feared the questions he might have. They imagined he might ask, ‘Why doesn’t God cut me a bit of slack and let me enjoy something of this Christian life I’ve just entered?’ But when they did see him lying in his hospital bed they were amazed. For all he wanted was for his friends to read him chunks of John 11. This was where he drew his comfort, reciting Jesus’ words ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ Soon he was to depart to be with the Jesus in whom he had put his trust only a few weeks before.