There’s this joke that I’ve heard among moms that’s something along the lines of “Did you keep the kids alive today? Yes? Great! You’re doing just fine.” It’s a joke that’s meant to acknowledge the challenges of being a parent, and remind us of the main goal: keep your kids alive.” You can still be a good mom despite messy houses, arm-length to-dos, and missing last week’s swim lessons because you forgot until it was too late to pack up as long as you’ve fulfilled the primary objective of keeping the kids alive.
Now, this joke has a hurtful side: our children’s lives are not the measure of our success as a parent—there are plenty of wonderful, successful parents who have lost children. But it reminds me of something profound and simple that a woman at my Bible study table mentioned.
She said: Everything we do is meant to keep us alive. We literally spend our whole lives avoiding death. Our whole goal in eating healthy, exercising, even working, building houses, etc., is meant to help us avoid discomfort and, ultimately, death.
And as people who spend their lives avoiding death, we sure don’t think about it very much.
It doesn’t make very much sense, does it?
Does anyone watch Doctor Who? There are creatures that appear several times throughout the show that have infested Earth. But their nature is such that the minute a human turns away from them, they immediately forget that they were there. The creatures are everywhere, in great number, ready to take over the planet. And yet despite the fact that they’re not hidden, humans have no idea that they’re there.
I think that’s what we do with death. We stare it in the face time after time after time—only to look away and forget what we saw.
But what if, by looking, and remembering what we see when we look at death, we can understand it, and learn from it?
That’s sort of what I want to do here. Memento mori—remember death. Because looking the enemy in the face takes the power of surprise and dread away, and we can more clearly see the hope given in Christ for what it is.