Thoughts on Death

Two months ago I started spending my Thursday afternoons at a nearby nursing home. I visit a woman named Millie who will probably not live much into next year. Since we spend most of our time in the common room, I end up interacting with staff members and other residents as well, and as Millie rarely speaks in more than short, nonsensical phrases and questions, I spend much of the time observing the room at large.

The nursing home is a sad place. Residents generally have some degree of dementia or some other mental disability. Millie often cries, seemingly out of the blue. She buries her wrinkled, mournful face in her cupped, knotty hands. Her shoulders shake. I wish I could know what specifically makes her sad, but asking questions doesn’t get me far. This week I’m going to take her some photos of my puppy. Maybe they’ll make her feel happy, at least for a time.

The nursing home can also be a warm and even comical place. The staff is affectionate with the residents, and though the residents can’t often articulate reciprocal pleasure, I see it in their faces. I observe the friendships Millie has with other women residents, like Helen. They smile at each other from across the table, wave when one is being wheeled past the other, converse incoherently in kind tones. Millie compliments Helen on her cute stuffed duckie (which really exists, and is cute). And I had to laugh last week when I heard one woman snarl, “Don’t you kick me again! Don’t you kick me!” after Helen had actually and purposefully nailed this other woman in the shin. It’s not every day I witness two 90something-year-old women in a physical fight.

I’ve never before spent regular time in a place of such overt transience. At the nursing home, people are coming to their end, mentally and physically, and everybody knows it. I just learned that Art, a dear, old British resident whom I loved to greet with a firm hand hold, died last week. His hands are cold and stiff now. He’s gone from us.

For some reason there’s recently been a series of deaths at my mom’s church, most of which have happened swiftly or unexpectedly. It seems like every time we talk on the phone, my mom leads with, “Have I told you about [fill in the blank] yet?”

“No . . .”

“She was diagnosed with cancer six weeks ago, and yesterday I played the piano at her funeral.”

Her accounts always end like this: “We just don’t know. We don’t know when the end will come, honey.”

I confess I’ve become desensitized to my mom’s accounts. I feel I need to pull myself out from under the weight of her pronouncements. In fact, I need to stop imagining what all these remnant family members are feeling at the loss of their loved ones. I can get weighed down and start to elevate death to an improper place, as if death is the final thing, the guillotine, the black-out, that will surely catch us off-guard and likely too soon.

I’m thankful to be spending regular time at a nursing home, where death is an understood, a given. The residents live with its inevitability every day, every hour. While each death in the nursing home is mourned, death is not given undue power. That’s a good picture for me as someone who tends to invest a lot of fear in the prospect of dying or losing someone I love most.

Of course my mom’s right. We don’t know when death will come to us. It really could be tomorrow, or tonight even. And it will be really difficult for those left here to mourn, and of course, we all need to be prepared spiritually for our own deaths.

Death brings very real pain, and we need and will need healing from the great losses we’ll inevitably experience at death’s hand. But there’s this, too, that truly changes things: “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54). We—I—cannot forget the Resurrection of Christ. Death has nowhere close to the final word. It is a temporary setback—a hard setback—but that is all.

O death, where is your sting?

Kicking Hospitality Out of the Kitchen

Is it really about the “home arts” or something deeper?

I once attended a women’s Bible study about hospitality. We discussed how to create nice centerpieces for our dining room tables; we got ideas for finding color-coordinated napkins at good sale prices; we learned the importance of planning and preparing a nice meal; we got tips about keeping a clean house.

I left that night feeling like I must be from another planet.

I’m a self-confessed messy—my home is hardly ever company-ready. And though I do highly value what I call the “home arts” (baking, gardening, and so on), I couldn’t help feeling like it was quite a dangerous assumption to equate these arts with hospitality. Were cute centerpieces really what Jesus and the biblical writers had in mind when they spoke and wrote about this important Christian practice?

Providing a really great dinner for friends is certainly a wonderful thing to do and can be part of our practice of hospitality. But the truth is that hospitality is more about our spiritual posture than about how well we arrange our physical surroundings.

The English word hospitality shares its root with hospital—in this sense, when we offer hospitality to others, we’re in some way giving valuable care and meeting significant needs. The New Testament word for hospitality challenges our assumptions even more deeply; it’s philoxenia, which means showing brotherly love (phileo) to strangers (xenia). It’s that xenia part that’s scary! If we limit our understanding of hospitality to caring for “safe” people like family and friends, we’re missing Scripture’s challenge to us: like the Good Samaritan, we are to provide care for those we don’t know. We are to concretely extend love and welcome to those who may be smelly or scary or just plain weird. What we often associate with June Cleaver, Rachel Ray, or Martha Stewart is better epitomized by Mother Teresa and those like her whose profound love welcomed in the diseased, the starving, the dying, the stranger.

When we really look into the Bible’s challenge to show hospitality, we discover that the tame, safe discipline we’ve relegated to the kitchen turns out to be one of the scariest of all. Hospitality challenges the very core of who we are and what we’re willing to do for God.

We each may express hospitality in different ways based on our God-given personalities, but my hope is that we each take on the challenge. From messies to gifted homemakers, from introverts to extroverts, we each can offer the love of Christ to those in need of care.

When has God used another’s hospitality to minister to you? Who is God asking you to open
your life to?

Well Run, My Good and Faithful Servant

What a personal best looks like

Meet Anne. She’s my running buddy. Anne and I have trained and run two Chicago Marathons together with Team World Vision. Both of us were inspired to leverage our good health to help raise money for clean water initiatives in parts of Africa that are experiencing one of history’s worst droughts and famines.

Last year during the marathon, Anne’s knee flared up to the point where she didn’t think she could continue running. I couldn’t bear to see my friend drop out of the race after having trained so hard for six months. For about the last six miles of the course, I kept telling her, “We’re going to finish this race, and we’ll do it one step at a time as slow or as fast as your body can manage. But we will finish, and we’re going to do it together. I’m not crossing the finish line without you.”

The last mile was especially painful for Anne. I reminded her why we were running—for the women who spend hours each day hauling buckets to and from river beds looking for water for their families.

“These women don’t get to cross a finish line, Anne. They have to keep going. Let’s keep going for them!” Having this visual in our heads, she and I crossed the finish line together. Slowing down for Anne didn’t help me break any records, but it felt far better to share the marathon finish with her instead of ahead of her and alone.

At this year’s Chicago Marathon, I wanted to give up at about mile 16. My brain got caught in a terrible loop of negativity fueled in part by my overheating body and my aching hips and feet. I hit a massive wall that left me feeling delirious with discouragement. I told Anne I needed to pull over and stretch. And then I broke down.

“I’m not sure how I’m going to do 10 more miles,” I told her. “You should go on and run at your own pace, because I’m going to ruin your race if you stay with me.”

I desperately wanted Anne to leave me and run on ahead. I wanted to die my own death, and I wanted to do it alone. Instead, Anne said, “I’m not leaving you. We’re going to finish this race, and we’re doing it together.”

At that moment I didn’t know whether to love or hate her.

Kindly but with firmness, Anne said, “We’ll walk a little bit, and then we’re going to run again. Remember, you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. We’re going to finish this marathon.”

Painfully, I put one foot in front of the other and started moving again. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” I focused on any bright spot on the horizon, a neon shirt, anything ahead, and repeated the verse over and over. I wore it out for the next 10 miles.

Several times I had to pull over to stretch, and I pleaded with Anne to go on without me. She just looked at me and smiled and said, “I’m not leaving you. I owe you.”

Anne probably would have finished this year’s race at least 30 minutes faster if she had just run on without me. Going into this marathon, she and I had hoped and prayed we’d better our time from last year. The day after this year’s marathon, Anne told me, “All season I had been wondering whether I would run well this year. While we were running, though, I knew that I would rather finish with you than go on ahead for a better time.” She said that sticking by me made it a well-run race, regardless of the clock.

It’s a humbling thing to have someone sacrifice their own success for you. Proverbs 18:24 paraphrased says, “A real friend sticks closer than a [sister].” Anne is a real friend. She stuck with me till the end. If God is keeping the record books from this year’s Chicago Marathon, no doubt he’d pronounce her finish a personal best.

Marian V. Liautaud is managing editor for GiftedforLeadership.com.

To Know and Be Known

If we’re so connected why are we so lonely?

When I was a little girl, I loved being with my neighbors—my best friend, Angi, and the three Kahler girls were always around to play while our moms sat together and talked. Later, when we moved, it was the Held girls and several other neighbor families who quickly became our new group of friends. Growing up, our neighborhoods felt like large extended families—we knew each other, we talked, we were friends.

But now, for many of us, the world is different. Despite technological advances like Facebook and Twitter that allow us to network and communicate constantly, we’re an increasingly isolated, anonymous culture. Many of us hardly know our neighbors and have merely peripheral relationships with coworkers. The social landscape in America has become disturbingly bleak.

Christians aren’t immune to this trend; like the culture at large, we often live lonely lives. As we clip through each day at a frenetic pace, we hardly have the time or emotional energy needed to go deeper in our relationships with Christian friends or even with our spouse.

Though the growing degree of social isolation in our culture is unprecedented, loneliness isn’t new. From the beginning of time, God declared that it wasn’t good for the first human to be alone (Genesis 2:18); though he was already in relationship with God, Adam also had a fundamental need for companionship with another human being. This same need for human connection lives on in each of us; we long to know be known—to be understood and loved both by God and by others. And from Adam and Eve’s first conflict until now, our efforts to sustain close human relationships—marriages, friendships, familial bonds—are fraught with missteps, misunderstandings, mistakes, and misplaced expectations. We get it wrong; we hurt others or are hurt by them. Inevitably, we end up feeling lonely.

I’m not one for gender stereotypes, but I do think it’s true that in general we women are wired to be “relational”—we long for communication, emotional expression, and intimacy with our friends and, if we’re married, with our husbands. And so for us, when friendships fall flat or our husbands disappoint us, feelings of loneliness can be an almost ever-present reality.

Loneliness is a perplexing reality for many Christians. After all, aren’t true Christian friendships supposed to solve this problem? Shouldn’t a strong Christian marriage eliminate feelings of loneliness all together? And if God truly satisfies us, why do we feel lonely at all?

When have you battled loneliness? How has your faith buoyed you through those times? How have you reached out to someone else who was lonely?

Thoughts on Death

Kicking Hospitality Out of the Kitchen

Well Run, My Good and Faithful Servant

To Know and Be Known