Why I Talk About My Death Before It's Staring Me in the Face

The last email I sent him affirmed his calling and his gifting. A few days later, he passed away.

He was a friend and teammate at Healthy Growing Leaders and we communicated almost every week. In our last coaching meeting, we talked about his next fifteen years. His plan was finally becoming clear. We had identified his superpowers as being safe, strategic, intuitive, and catalytic. It is a constellation of strengths I've rarely seen in one person. He was one of the most gifted coaches I have known in all my years of ministry, and I told him so.

I had known him for over a decade. He was feeling valued, accepted and needed.

His absence has left a hole my heart, and there is uncertainty about it. Why would God allow him to go home now, right when everything was converging?

I don't have a tidy answer. But his death has forced me back to something I've been learning my whole life: death is a neglected and yet essential part of life. And how we handle that neglect shapes everything.

A Culture Built on Avoidance

The night after I got the news, I watched the final installment of Mission: Impossible. Tom Cruise is spared probable death numerous times in that one movie. And now in some movies, the stars somehow even return to life after dying! It struck me that this is our whole culture in miniature. We go to great lengths to keep from facing our own mortality. Even our current 24 hour news cycle is built upon acknowledging death and tragedy cognitively and then moving on to the next news event without allowing us to process the ultimate consequences of death.

A friend once asked me how I got so comfortable talking about death, both my own and others. I told him I couldn't avoid it; it has been all around me in my family and friends. This is simply another example.

But most people can avoid it and do. And I've come to believe that avoidance carries three costs:

1. It keeps us living a shallow life and experiencing a shallow death.

2. It prevents us from preparing for our own death.

3. It makes death far more traumatic when it finally touches us.

Which means the inverse is also true. When we live in light of eternity, in light of our own eventual death and what we believe comes next, each of those costs are reversed.

Depth: What Eternity Does to Ordinary Days

First, as I face the reality of my death, I find a hope that transcends this life and that hope gives depth to my present living.

That hope has given me purpose beyond the mundane, courage to attempt things beyond my own capability, and a focus on people other than myself. I help people who cannot help me back, because I believe there is more to life than meeting my own needs while I'm here. Honestly, even if eternity turned out not to be real, I am still be a better person for having lived as though it is.

It also makes me willing to go deeper. Because I know I won't be here forever, I keep exploring demanding subjects and demanding conversations that I would otherwise not be motivated to enter. If we were on this earth by chance, with only a few years of breathing ahead of us, why bother? I would just eat, drink, use people to keep myself happy, and die with few regrets and a shallow life would end in a shallow death.

The New Testament paints a different picture of the person we're becoming; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5). Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience (Colossians 3). Pick any list in the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, if we all lived those qualities, the whole world would be a better place. And here is the good news: we don't conjure these qualities up ourselves. We give the Spirit control and the basic building blocks, what I call spiritual exercises, and He is faithful to change us from the inside out.

Eternity isn't an escape from this life. It's what gives this life its weight, power and meaning.

Preparation: Talking About It Before It's Staring at You

Second, as I face the reality of my death, I find I don't live in fear of it. It becomes an expectation rather than a terror. Expectations can be prepared for.

So, I talk with people about what it will be like when I'm no longer here. I deal with wills, wishes, and end-of-life decisions long before they're staring me in the face. It is far better to work through these things when emotions are calm and there's time to think, rather than in the reactive rush of a crisis when decisions must be made quickly. Because there is no fear, we can talk rationally and honestly about what would be best, for me and for those around me.

I have watched families split because someone refused to make unpopular decisions before they were gone, leaving the hardest calls to the people left behind. Refusing to prepare for your death isn't humility or optimism. It's cowardice and avoidance. Someone else pays for it.

Resilience: Shocked, But Not Shattered

Last, as I face the reality of my own death, I find that death, even sudden death, is not as traumatic.

I was shocked by my colleague's death. Surprised, because he was a close friend and confidant, and I expected him to be alongside me in ministry for years to come. But I was not shocked as one without hope. My life is not spiraling.

He and I had actually talked about our inevitable deaths several times, usually while discussing what we wanted to accomplish before then. He had a lot left to do. But I know he is with our Lord, and I trust that what was unfinished here is not lost there.

Underneath this resilience is something Jesus said: true worship of God happens in Spirit and in Truth (John 4:23) because that is what God is. When I worship God in Spirit and Truth, my soul is nourished in the spiritual domain, not merely the physical one. And a soul nourished there is prepared for death, because the soul does not cease to exist when the body does. I am not worried about losing my physical body, because my significance was not embedded in it.

That's the quiet secret of resilience in grief. It's not toughness. It's where you've been keeping your treasure all along.

I have learned over the years that the grief we experience in losing someone is directly related to the love we exchanged in life. The deeper the love, the greater the grief. So I don't resent the hole in my heart. The hole is the receipt of a relationship well invested.

Dallas Willard used to pray a blessing over his students every semester: that they would have "a rich life of joy and power, abundant in supernatural results, with a constant, clear vision of never-ending life in God's world before you... A radiant life and a radiant death."

My friend had a radiant life. I believe he is more alive now than he has ever been. And his death is asking me, asking all of us, the same question:

Are you avoiding your death, or living in light of it?

Because a shallow life makes for a shallow death. But a life lived facing eternity has depth now, peace about what's coming, and hope strong enough to hold when the phone rings.

Don't wait for the phone to ring to find out which type of life you are living.