Lent: Day 10

Death Can Be Beautiful

Scripture: I Corinthians 15:51-56

When death took my wife and the Mother of my two young children, they asked me what I thought about life after death and asked for an explanation of what it must be like to die.

We talked about the fact that there are lots of things in the Bible that we don’t fully understand, but if we can trust God with our lives today, we should be able to trust Him after death.

I told them of an experience their Mother and I had one summer when we were both counselors at Camp Aldersgate. She had four girls and I had four boys in adjoining cottages. We had taken our family groups down early for lunch one day and were waiting by the lake, when one of the children discovered this funny looking old brown bug that had fastened himself to a rock and was struggling to get out of his hard, brown shell. We watched him and wondered until the final dinner bell rang and we had to go in.

After lunch, he was still there – still trying to free himself. We all watched again until quiet time and then I stayed on while the others went back to the cabins.
At last he was free of that shell – but stayed on the rock – pumping strength into those long, slender iridescent wings. Finally he crawled onto my finger and I carried him through the camp. The children ran out to see, and just as I got to the last cabin where my boys were, he took off ... almost straight up above the pines and out into the glorious sunshine.

I don’t know how much this story did for the children, but I know I’ll never forget that ugly little brown bug that lived in the mud of the lake and transformed into a beautiful creature (dragon fly) before our very eyes. “Death is swallowed up in victory...”

If God planned things like that for His creatures, what must He have in store for us, His children?