This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death. 

The Bible says in Matthew 10:28: "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."

The featured quote for this episode is from Helen Keller. She said, "Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see."

Our topic for today is titled "When Death Arrives (Part 5)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.

--- Death & Evil

While dying well is often a matter of living well, to live well we must come to grips with our death. It is difficult, but it can also be invigorating. “It is only by facing and accepting the reality of my coming death that I can become authentically alive,” says the Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware. 

We avoid death or even fear it because death is an evil, the horrible rending of a person from her body, from loved ones, from the ability to be fully in God’s image. “Death is not part of God’s primary purpose for his creation,” writes Ware. “He created us, not in order that we should die, but in order that we should live." Jesus wept at Lazarus’s death. The apostle Paul called death the last enemy. Death is indeed evil. 

Yet death is also a mercy; it is the final affliction of life’s miseries. It is the entrance to life with God. Life’s passing can be a beautiful gift of God. This riddle of death’s evil and its blessing is not difficult to solve. We enact it every Good Friday as we recall the evil of Christ’s death to be followed on Easter Sunday with the joy of his resurrection. We do not rejoice in Christ’s death or Judas’s betrayal. Yet there is no evil so great that God cannot bring joy and goodness from it. That is why death deserves our attention in life. Because we instinctively want to avoid it, to turn our face away, it is good to look death in the eye and constantly remind ourselves that our hope is in God, who defeated death. 

Meditating on one’s death has been practiced throughout Christian history. St. Isaac the Syrian instructed, "Prepare your heart for your departure. If you are wise, you will expect it every hour... And when the time of departure comes, go joyfully to meet it, saying, 'come in peace. I knew you would come, and I have not neglected anything that could help me on the journey.'"