I now Understand Death

When memories of where I was when I heard of my younger sister's passing in 2016, decide to visit, I end up questioning God. Everything awakens. I have this mind that family and peers describe as morbid. It vividly paints a picture of every image relayed to it. Mine is not a fearful brain. When it hears "don't go there!" it interprets it as a beckoning gesture that yearns for it to explore it all.

After burial my eyes are fixated to the setting sun. They know that when going to the cemetery, we head to that direction. I watch its fading light disappear and darkness takes over. On the first day, I worry if she will be okay lying there alone. I fear for her 21 year old body lying there without us to protect it from everything that might cause her harm. I then think about the decaying process, let me shut this down!

My understanding about why we die as a Christian is based on the conclusion that God borrows us our loved ones. Now, before they became ours, they were his. 

Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you..."

He already had an idea of who he was to bring in this earth before we could even conceive of the possibility of a mother being with child. 

Isaiah 43:1 "Fear not, for I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by thy name; thou art Mine." 

We belong to God. We were created by him, for him. When you borrow something from someone, it would be so inconsiderate to expect them not to want it back. 

Ezekiel 18:23 proves that we and God have different perceptions of death.

" Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?"

To him, to "live" is the changing from our sinful worldly ways and being transformed in the spirit by accepting him as our Lord and savior.

To us, death is something that happens in our fleshly form. We function on feeling and let us not forget that seeing is believing and if we can't see it and touch it, that's unfair to us.

 I overly fixate on how long it takes for a body to fully decompose. I am truly morbid. I have imagined the decomposition of my Papa who died 14 years ago.

Matthew 10:28 cautions us about the fear of a bodily death. 

"Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul." 

Someone once said that; "death is not from God!" 

They were taught at church that it's from the devil, but for me; death is from God. The body is a vessel that contains the spirit. You find people fixated about looks and not understanding that what's inside is what matters. 

2 Corinthians 3:10

"For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does."

The flesh is in the world and when someone dies, the spirit detaches itself from the body. We are left clenching on the body and yelling all queries to God because without the spirit, there's no body. 

We don't set our standards according to earthly standards. The Bible advises us to set our eyes on things above. These are things that surpass worldly understanding. 

When someone dies, God removes the spirit from the body and the body is now an empty tin. It is full of organs, but they can't operate themselves without the spirit. 

John 20:17

"Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

We ascend the father in spirit. What we as his creation need to do is follow his teachings and remember that this life is his. The flesh and all that are genetics, but the true image that God is concerned with is the spirit. Are you abiding by his teachings? "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." The flesh dies. The spirit is stronger than the flesh. The flesh can be deformed but it is the spirit that reminds us all that there is beauty in God. We are all going to die. The time is known by God because we are his. I have stopped questioning and working on a greater understanding of how to be filled with the spirit that I forget about the flesh. As much as the flesh is essential for the spirit, being too focused on it can be detrimental to the spirit.