The Gateway

He lay there dying right before our eyes. Oxygen and Morophin were slowly losing their power.

He had loved the same girl for sixty some years. He saw four generations gathered around his table every Sunday after church.

Each breath had become a fight. His daughter asked him if there was something holding him back. "I have no enemies," he replied. "But last time you mowed the lawn you didn't sweep it and left a lot of grass laying out there."

She went out and swept the lawn. As the maple tree tinted orange, he looked toward Heaven and struggled no more.

And just next door a little girl swung high on her swing. Her toes pointed to the sky. Her laughter rippled and caught in the wind.

And this Momma's heart tore wide open. Because some days the contradiction feels too great. How can life and death live next door to each other? How can they both exist in the same wrenched world?

Instead of an answer, I feel a longing rise up through the heart wound. A longing to know and feel and experience what full love and total glory really is. C. S. Lewis said, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."

And I think God has known that all along. He placed us in a paradise of a garden and intended for us to spend forever there. We ate and were cursed but this was never his plan.

He didn't imagine giggling little girls and gasping old men living next door to each other. He created life and breath. We invited death and decay.

And the contradiction feels too great because it really is too great. We were created for glory and relationship, but we struggle in a world of sin and distance. Distance from the one who formed us and longs to know us. And the only way to bridge that distance is by dying.

Could death be both the problem and the answer? Is it possible that death is the curse for those left behind and the solution for the one who went home?

Only in our homegoing will our longing for more be satisfied. Only then, will we experience the life we were intended for.

We say that death is a part of life. I never liked that idea because I always thought death was the opposite of life, not a part of it. But I'm starting to think of death as the part of this life that transports us into real life.

In every hospital, the old release their last breath and babies gasp their first. Death and life must be so intertwined and connected because death is not the end of life, but a gateway to more.