Rachel Marie Stone: A Time to Die

A good and thoughtful piece on the art of dying, largely lost in our culture today. I would only disagree with one thing Stone writes. I agree with her sentiment that if one is a Christian, there are far worse things than dying because we believe that in Jesus, God has conquered death. But as Christians we still consider death an enemy because God created us for life, not death. Death was not part of the creative purposes and intentions of God (cf. Genesis 1.1-3.19). Paul states this clearly when he says that Jesus must destroy every ruler and every authority and power [of darkness]. “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death [emphasis mine]” (1 Corinthians 15.24-26).

In modern medicine, “the unspoken maxim has become, ‘if we can, we must,'” Katy Butler writes. She sought an A Time to Diehistorically and ethically considered answer to her family’s conviction that her father’s pacemaker should be turned off so that, in the words of their medically conservative, Catholic, and perhaps a bit old-fashioned primary care physician, “nature” might “take its course.”

Yet in the new medical landscape, where death is perceived as an enemy to be vanquished at all costs, both fiscal and human (millions and billions are spent to keep terminal patients alive past the point of any hope of a meaningful recover), expressing the wish that an inevitable death might not be drawn out is highly contested, even among Christians, for whom death is not—or shouldn’t be—the final enemy.

Check it out and see what you think.