The Slavery of the Fear of Death

A couple of weeks ago I went to visit some friends while my husband stayed home with our children. Before I reached my destination, my thoughts had my husband deceased from a brain aneurysm with my three-year-old daughter desperately trying to phone me, unsure of what was wrong with her daddy. Nothing happened to any of us that night, but my heart sure was racing just at the thought of it. Martin Luther once said, “You cannot keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.” And that night, I was definitely building a nest.

Fear can take many forms- small, big, irrational, paralyzing, and sometimes, substantiated. Living in the “age of information,” we see headlines daily of food recalls, violence, and natural disasters on every form of screen we own. Just a simple scroll on social media can promote thoughts of worry and fear about bathroom fans being a fire hazard or a “deadly” ant newly discovered in my town. Maybe we should never leave the house. Maybe we should never go outside. I suffered from some yellow jacket stings a couple of years ago after standing near a nest, and I still feel the physiological effects of sweat and panic when I hear that familiar buzzing sound. 

We live in a world where “time and chance happen to us all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). Just recently a town in Texas experienced an unheard-of disaster as copious amounts of rainfall caused a river to overflow and flood homes in the middle of the night. The thoughts arise- “Can that happen here? Could the creek behind my own house rise like that?” Living in a first world country, I do not come face to face with the reality of death very much. Humanity has come a long way in modern medicine and safety standards, by God’s grace. It’s just not very common these days for a child to grow up witnessing the death of their seven siblings who didn’t make it to adulthood. 

In Martin Lloyd Jones' book, “Spiritual Depression,” he writes that we need to “know exactly where to draw the line between legitimate forethought and paralyzing forethought. Now it is right that we should think about the future, and it is a very foolish person who does not think about it all. But what we are always warned against in Scripture is about being worried about the future.” As finite and dependent creatures, it is part of our sinful nature to fear because we cannot know the future. But we know the One who holds it. We cannot rationalize in our minds what happened in Texas, but we can bow our heads and pray like Moses in Psalm 90, “Teach us to number our days so we may get a heart of wisdom.”

God does not give us the grace for the “what if” scenarios, but we can trust His grace will be there if anything like that has been ordained for us. So, we can move on and do the “next faithful thing,” as we redirect our thoughts to whatever is good, lovely, excellent, and praiseworthy.

I think if we’re honest with ourselves, the reason why these headlines are disturbing is because we’re holding onto this life a little too tightly. Yes, we should strive to make wise decisions in everything, but when all these fears start to paralyze us, I think it’s revealing an idol in our hearts. We can quickly forget that this isn’t it. We were made for another world, where there is no death or darkness or pain, no listeria, hurricanes, or microplastics in your drinking water.

One of the main reasons I enjoy reading Christian biographies is because it helps me see more vividly the character of our heavenly Father through the lives of other Christians. The saints that God elects to be rewarded those white robes in heaven are also human and frail, with their own weaknesses and temptations. But, their heroism reflects God’s glory in marvelous ways.

Recently I have been reflecting on the lives of John and Betty Stam, a missionary couple both beheaded at an age younger than I am today. Their story hits home because they had a three-month-old baby they had to leave behind. When they were summoned to their beheadings, Betty hides her baby with some diapers and two five-dollar bills tucked inside her sleeping bag. She entrusted the life of this helpless infant to her Father, our Father. My human frailty thinks, “I don’t know if I could do that. There’s no way I could bear that.” But the Giver of Grace is the one who remains constant. It’s not human strength we derive from those moments. There is truly nothing inside of us that could muster that kind of faith because it is supernatural. “It is God who works within us both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).  John and Betty could exit that room and put one foot after another because their Savior made the same kind of walk 2,000 years prior that took away the sting of death.

My little girl has questions about death and heaven all of the time. Some days she says she does not want to go to heaven, that she wants to live in our house forever (a house with leaky water pipes, dusty floors, and clogged rain gutters). She doesn’t want her brother, or herself, to have to die one day. She does not understand what “God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). 

Perhaps without knowing it, I can be like my three-year-old and not see death as gain. Maybe my own creature comforts and decent health have allowed me to become “far too easily pleased,” as C.S. Lewis once put it. I think it is nearsightedness and unbelief that cause my heart rate to increase and my voice to falter when I am met with the unknown. But like the Stams, and every martyr and faithful brother and sister who have gone before us, I want to faithfully put one foot in front of the other on the way to my eternal home. I want my daughter to see her parents live out what they truly believe, that physical death, and dying to ourselves every day, is gain. 

I hope she sees a mom who is walking by faith, who is not afraid to step onto an airplane because of recent plane crashes covered on the news, or afraid to go into a grocery store because it’s RSV season. My hope is that tragedies, natural disasters, even the everyday inconvenience, wouldn’t provoke fear, but teach me to keep a quiet heart and hold the reins of this life loosely, even ready to pin two five-dollar bills to what I hold most dearly. My prayer is that I would trust God to take care of what I leave behind. 

“Because the Sovereign Lord helps me,

    I will not be disgraced.

Therefore, have I set my face like flint,

    and I know I will not be put to shame.” (Isaiah 50:7)