When Death Comes

In a letter to a friend, Thomas Jefferson once wrote: “There is a fulness of time when men should go.”

This may be easy to understand when men have reached an age that is old and have become weary of the ways of this life. But death is more difficult to accept when it makes what seems to us to be an untimely call⎯when it takes children who have not lived a fullness of years⎯when it takes the young, the vigorous⎯when it takes beloved companions, friends, and close kin. Seldom, if ever, are we ready for it when it visits those we love.

There are exceptions to be sure. Sometimes death seems to be welcome and kindly, when it comes to those who wait for it to come, to those who are weary and would be on their way to other work. But it isn’t always so.

An old man may live long; a young man may die soon. A sick man may linger; a youth may be stricken. All that happens in this world is not of our planning nor to our liking. There are times when decisions are in hands higher than ours, and fighting the irrevocable decisions of the Almighty only adds to the burden and the bitterness.

Even though the pattern may not be of our making, nor within our understanding, it is what it is, and insofar as we accept it as it is. Even as we expect our own children to accept some things which we do not fully explain, so we, as children of God, our Eternal Father, are expected to have faith beyond the limits of our actual knowledge.

We move by faith in many things⎯because we must. We move by faith or we do not move at all, because there is so much that we cannot now know. And it is for us to remember that life itself is a gift of God, and not to any man that we know of is there given any guarantee of years in this life. But for all men there is immortality⎯both for us and for those we cherish and love. And surely we can trust Him who gave us life, to give equal or greater meaning to death and to the life that extends eternally beyond.