Dear friend,
I am very grateful that I have roses on my kitchen table. They are making me feel a little bit brighter on this bustley grey day. It’s been a bad week but a better day. It was really lovely this morning before the clouds moved in with their grey filter.
Let’s talk about death. I can’t seem to get it out of my head. And it’s coming up everywhere.
This winter has brought a lot of heaviness with it. The heaviness of sickness, of grief, of depression, of loneliness and of death. Sam and I both lost a grandma in January. It was very sad to say goodbye to two precious women who mean so much to us. We will miss them.
I don’t like death. When you’re mourning there’s intense sadness but also and ongoing struggle, as if you’re wearing it like a massive heavy cloak, weighing you down and sucking the hope out of you.
This week, facing another relapse and collapse into my bed and internally collapsing into myself, has felt like a kind of death. A death to normality and a death to a lot of the joy and peace I had been experiencing before. I tried to meet God in it but found him silent, or at least too quiet to hear over the shouting of my sadness. I found myself in a bitter dialogue with God; overwhelmed by fatigue, fear and loneliness. After genuinely punching a pillow until I had no energy left, I heard myself sobbing at him, “Why did you bring me to the desert to die?” “That’s from the Bible,” I thought. So I looked up that moment when the Israelites have been through the Red Sea, rescued, into the desert and then they run out of water. Previously I had always thought their complaint at God was idiotic, seeing as He had just done this crazy cool miracle for them making a way though the sea. However, in looking at it that day I was on their side. Of course they were anxious! They were in a desert with no water! Of course they were angry; they were staring down the barrel of the gun of death.
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:10 “We always carry around in our bodies the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. We who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.” I like to ignore this bit of my favourite chapter of the bible, and read the other bits around it. But its seemed to me recently there’s a doctrine of death that we can’t avoid if we choose to follow Jesus. It’s a core part of who he was, of what he did.
It’s the age old problem, the problem of how the truth we long for: Gods perfect love for us - doesn’t seem to fit with the truth we experience: the terrible pain and suffering of this life. “Yet it is exactly at this point - that God answers us...At Calvary (the cross), God invites us to vent our anger and our rage upon him in order that we may discover in him a love that is stronger than death.” (A year lost and found, Michael Mayne) Because Jesus died, but the grave could not hold him.
At the cross Jesus meets us in our suffering. He experiences it. He takes it.
And then he destroys it.
I heard a story recently about a Jewish community in Belgium, struggling to recover from the holocaust. The woman describing the situation said there were two different kinds of people, “those that did not die - and those that came back to life.”
In order for a flower to self seed, the flower has to die. In order that God could do a miracle in the desert and provide water from a rock (a rock??!!!), the Israelites has to experience unsustainable thirst (exodus 17:1-7). In order to show his disciples that he was master over death by raising someone from the grave, Lazarus had to die (John 11:1-44).
In order to resurrect, we have to die.
This isn’t empty religion. We are not in the game of making people feel better, for a quick win. “Fake religion says: ‘fear not, trust in God and he will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you.’ That of real religion is, ‘fear not, the things that you are afraid of are likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.’” (Mayne)
We know from our own lives that just because you pray does not stop bad things happening, or make sure you don’t feel them. But Jesus not only understands our pain and walks alongside us in it, but He promises to redeem it.
The good news is that now we can stare death in the face, we can walk through all kinds of death, and trust that we know the One who can get us out. The One who can bring us back from the dead. The One who can create new life from the ashes.
I know in my life He is asking me to follow him there. To the place where the death in my story reveals Jesus’ life. And for me at the moment that means accepting that some of my plans and dreams need to die. A lot of my self-sufficiency needs to die. My pretence at being perfect, or at least pretty awesome, needs to die. My desire for control, to make sure I can stop bad stuff happening, and my constant planning and self protection, needs to die. What I want for myself, needs to die.
Dying hurts. Having your fears revealed, your failures exposed and your weakness made obvious, hurts.
But in the death there is hope. Think of all the wonderful things God can do with me when there is nothing of that old life left. If I die to myself, I rise with Jesus. And whatever Jesus resurrects in me, can never die. As I let go of all of that, I can take hold of Him.
And he promises to resurrect me, to redeem me. To grow beauty, freedom, compassion, trust and genuine selfless love, in the place where all I could do was try to avoid dying.
It is an upside down kingdom, a backwards logic, but I am captivated by the only one in all of history who does not try to explain away or avoid pain, but actually takes it into his loving hands, and transforms it into life.
Katy x
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” Matthew 16:25