Life and Death

It takes a momentous personal tragedy before one can really think through the topic of Life and Death. If we're lucky, this experience is delayed until we're nearing the ends of our own lives because when tragedy occurs, we must draw upon all our years living experiences to resolve and move on. Never to forget, but rather to heal our emotional wounds with heavy scars and move on. The greatest pity is to the young sorrowers. Everyone feels the raw heartbreak of permanent, helpless loss. But children don't have the thick skins developed over time from smaller hurts and offsetting triumphs to buffer these agonies. After a tragic death, particularly an early one, most of us ask the unanswerable question, Why? In God's name, why??	Many rationalizations pop into the fevered mind. The solution that popped into mine was that it was one of God's ways to explode "good" into the world. What's that you say! Yes -- good! Realization arrived during my brother Bruce's funeral when I saw the agony etched in the faces of the grieving. When someone really loved dies before his time there is a huge loss due to the happiness he would have spread had he remained alive. But he is still only one person. When he dies however, there is a multitude of people that he had affected earlier that now are affected more-so in his passing. A significant number of them become better people after the loss: more accepting, more tolerant, more giving, less judgmental. These people leave and spread their new-found love to others. It's as though a bomb has exploded and infused all these people with good.	Maybe this is God's bomb-- to control a human society so that we don't drift too far astray. I don't believe that God views life and death in the same manner that we do. It seems like an obvious statement because if He felt the same way we did, He would eliminate death. We look at life and death as opposites: you're either alive or you're dead. We understand that death is part of life. It's unavoidable. But God may look at them as virtually the same. There's a life (on Earth) and an afterlife (what we call death). It's all life to God. And if anything, to God our death isn't part of our life but life is part of our death. The afterlife is forever whereas life on Earth is over almost as soon as it starts - on God's time scale.
Yet God isn't heartless about death. Everything that lives dies and He makes it generally as painless as possible. When the pain gets too great - the system shuts down: humans and other members of the animal kingdom go into shock or lose consciousness. The great predators generally kill their prey almost instantly. Lions bite down on the windpipes to kill their prey or enemies. Consciousness fades -- quickly then the feasting begins. Where the predators killing behavior doesn't limit the victim's pain, shock shuts them down instead. Wolves and dingoes (Australian wild dogs) don't have the power of lions to suffocate their prey. Of necessity, these packs drag larger animals down and devour them living. Yet, after observing and filming many of these acts, scientists conclude that the prey	doesn't feel as much pain as we would think. With rapid acceptance of the situation, the victims go dormant. They stop struggling or even squealing, then lose consciousness through lack of blood, and die. Throughout the animal kingdom many examples can be seen of deaths being as merciful as possible. Snakes may incapacitate their victims with venom or constriction. Lacking chewing style teeth, snakes only kill prey that they can swallow. They swallow these animals head first - always. If still alive, they lose consciousness quicker that way. Look at the Preying Mantis. This is a creature straight from a science fiction horror movie - if it were not just an insect. The Mantis kills its prey almost immediately by devouring it head first. It might seem cruel, but how much more cruel would it be if it started at the limbs?	Sooner or later we all question God as to why He would create such a world where virtually all creatures must kill in order to survive. Not too many fish die of old age I'd guess. And the daily wars ongoing in the insect world are too horrific to even consider. On our terms we can never answer that question: "Why?" But if life is as death, there is an answer. The microscopic time we're living allows us to intensely feel the struggle and develop understanding and compassion. We carry these qualities with us forever in the after life. Nothing comes easily. We can't develop the compassion without feeling the pain. All of us must have it before entering God's kingdom. And although we all must endure life to gain His kingdom, God makes it as pain free as possible.